


Overdrive

by viaorel



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Derek has a kid, Everyone is older, M/M, Made up werewolf rules, Magic!Stiles, sheriff!derek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2017-06-25
Packaged: 2018-08-07 23:56:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 40,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7734808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viaorel/pseuds/viaorel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six years ago, the pack's Second suddenly disappears into thin air with no explanation or reason whatsoever. Time has passed, wounds have started to heal when Stiles reappears in Beacon Hills seeming to have his own agenda and no apparent desire to either explain himself or atone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s the tone they all use that gets to him. Not the words, which are mostly just gasps of shock and indignation mixed with the stale filling of _poor thing_ , _such a nightmare_ and other meaningless crap.

It’s the fucking tone, dark, soaked with concern, the type of tone you can hear in the hospital when people talk in hushed voices and tiptoe around the immediate family.

Ridiculous. It’s as if all of them simultaneously decided to put him in the grave way ahead of his time and mourn him. The news has just hit town, and somehow, with their beehive mind, they all knew for a fact that it would rip open the barely healed wounds and break him anew in all the wrong places. The worst part of it was that they were probably right.

Derek can’t help feeling trapped in his own office while the news keeps spreading around like some deadly African bug. It’s an okay-sized room, well aired and lit, with an impressive desk and all the knickknacks the previous owner refuses to take back home stacked here and there on the shelves, but in the end the room is nothing but a cell. How can he go out, give orders, behave like his normal self when they all _know_?

“Have you heard?..”

“How long do you think we can keep it from the sheriff?”

“In this town? Try never.”

All that buzzing. Derek wants to melt right into his swivel chair. Disappear, dissipate, disperse. Forget.

Then the phone on his desk, which lies right next to his badge, explodes with all the beeps, and they keep gushing in, unthwarted, for ten minutes straight. Derek just sits there, eyes closed, and blankly listens to the cacophony of the hysterics from his phone and the juicy gossip going outside his office.

“Do you think we are allowed to say “hi” to him? Kind of awkward, this whole thing.”

“I know, right? It’s the worst.”

“Wonder if he’s also still single.”

“I hope this is not some pathetic rekindling the old flame bit.”

“I don’t even know which is crueler.”

In the end, Derek gives up (after all, he is only human. Sort of) and checks a few messages from his pack. They all look pretty much the same: walk-on-eggshells remarks, reassurances in terms of where their loyalties lie (Scott is particularly passionate in this department). Lydia sends a picture. It’s from far away and is a bit smudgy, but Derek would recognize that profile anywhere.

 _Fuck_.

The phone slips out of his hand and makes a disgruntled noise hitting the desk surface. Derek hardly registers that. His head hurts so bad.

He can feel them all reaching out, trying to hug the pain out of him, their sorrow as genuine as it comes. He pushes the warmth and the comfort away for now, failing to comprehend how it will only get the pack more panicky and needy. They will be treating him with kid gloves for days to come. They might be wise to do so.

Scott is the one with enough balls to call first.

“Hey,” he says in the typical apologetic tone, which Derek just loathes. They stay silent for many long seconds before Scott makes another attempt, “So I guess you’ve heard.”

Derek makes an undistinguishable sound deep in his throat, and the amount of pain even he can hear in it makes him flinch.

“I didn’t know,” Scott hurries and inhales sharply as if he were drowning and helplessly reaching for words – the only thing that could save him. “Really, I mean, you can trust me there. If you want me to-”

“No.”

The word makes its way out of his mouth before he can register it is even there. He frowns in doubt. Can he really rely on Scott to go and sort this shitstorm-to-come for him? Is this even possible to solve without his interference? If only.

“He’s at that shitty coffee place now, talking with the owner.” If Scott’s tone is anything to go by, this is an attempt to calm him down. A rather poor one, in fact. “I could keep an eye on him. You know. Sniff around.”

The first impulse is to say “no” again, but Derek bites his tongue. After all, what is the harm if Scott wants to ditch work and play stalker for an hour or so? Besides, Scott has the quickest reaction among his betas, he will be helpful in case. . .

 _In case what?_ a voice demands inside Derek’s head _. It’s your town, Sheriff Alpha._ _The only threat here is you._

 “Just, okay, but don’t get too close,” he blurts out before he gets a chance to doubt the impulse. “Hear me? Promise me, Scott.”

“I promise.”

Derek doesn’t remember what he does for the next whole hour before the previous owner of this office – the only owner, that’s how it still feels to Derek – knocks on the door twice. He looks hesitant, drained. Guilty a great deal, and somehow much, much older than he looked yesterday.

“I-” he starts to come up with something as he quietly shuts the door before any of the rubbernecks behind his back take a peek. “Are you busy? I just wanted a quick word.”

“Not at all, Mayor,” Derek rises, and oh, here it comes again. The usual wave of guilt and shame he feels around this man. Will he ever grow up? “It’s always a pleasure. You needn’t have come though, really.”

Mayor Stilinski sinks into the guest chair with the old man grunt he didn’t have five years ago. Now this is his usual sound, the Mayor sound, and it will never stop being sad for Derek. Still, having the people you care about age beats never seeing them age at all by a mile.

The Mayor inhales deeply, as if preparing for a really long sentence, but what comes out is just this.

“He just showed up on my doorstep this morning.”

“What?”

“Don’t give me that straight face, Derek, I know that you know,” the Mayor snaps and looks away for a long minute filled with tense silence. “He called once or twice over the years,” he goes on, and suddenly his voice cracks and wavers. Derek thinks his day cannot get any worse than that. “But he never said anything about coming back. And today. . . He was just _there_. Duffel bag over shoulder, face thinner, hair longer. He seems to ‘ve gotten taller, too. He said. . .”

“Mayor,” Derek cuts him when this sad little voice becomes too much to bear. “Please, you don’t have to. He doesn’t owe me anything.”

That’s when Mayor Stilinski turns his head and pins Derek down with an intense stare, like the berserk soldier he still is on the stratum too deep to be revealed without a strong shake – such as this one.

“Derek , you know how much I love my son,” he says in that numb voice that is never a good sign. “But the next time you see him, I give you full permission to punch him right in the gut. Don’t say he owes you nothing, don’t lie to me.”

 _I’m not_ , is what Derek wants to say. He doesn’t though, because the berserk soldier sees all.

“I won’t punch him,” is what he goes for, and it’s the truth.

Mayor Stilinski stands up then, stooping just ever so slightly. His eyes are still burning mad.

“I’m just saying, Derek. If you want to set things straight with my son, I’m okay with whatever way you choose.”

After the true owner of this office leaves, another hour passes, and when it’s impossible to ignore the incessant calling and the needy reaching of his pack, he gets the hell out of the office. People call after him, others shush them. He has really warm-hearted staff, the thought comes to him already in the car. They all deserve a saner boss.

The patrol car is hardly a disguise, but then again, why should he bother with hiding? It’s his town, his territory. He’s the Alpha here, and he’s not afraid of any ghosts from the past.

Scott practically runs into his car a block away from the place he said he would be. He quickly jumps onto the shotgun seat and makes a point by gazing into Derek’s eyes.

 _I’m here_ , this gaze says. _I’m on your side. Always._

He ruffles the beta’s hair and sends him a calming signal. It takes more time and energy than Derek feels comfortable giving away now, but the others should always know their Alpha can keep it together.

“He bought out the place,” Scott looks almost guilty about the fact. On top of that, the poor guy looks indignant and shaken, which is as Scott-like behavior as Lydia making a typo. “They had all the papers ready, can you believe it? He must have been planning this for weeks. That shithead. I heard him say that he’s going to fix that place up starting tomorrow.”

Derek presses his hand to the scruff of his beta’s neck and says, voice as kind as he can now muster, “Thank you. Now please, go home and don’t do anything stupid. Can you promise me that?”

Scott is the hardest element here. If he makes Scott give up his feistiness, the rest of the pack will follow suit. Derek puts more pressure – just a little bit. Being a kind Alpha is like rope-walking: you make one extra movement and you are sure to come crashing down.

This time he gets the formula right though. Scott drops his gaze and suddenly, heartbreakingly, looks seventeen again.

“Can I call Allison and tell her?”

“Only if she doesn’t tell Chris or Talia.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

They hug, and Scott whimpers quietly when he gets plunged into Derek’s emotion pool. He doesn’t say anything, just opens the door – and then he is gone. Derek traces his movements with his eyes closed to make sure Scott was actually going home. He eavesdrops on half of his conversation with Allison, who is thankfully too far away now and won’t be coming here with a fully loaded crossbow any time soon.

And then, all of a sudden, the terrifying aloneness is stifling. He can feel his pack spread evenly around town, all of them confused and burning with indignation, but this is nothing compared to the gaping wound in his chest that has made its harrowing appearance after years, and the wound is pulsing and aching and pleading to get sewn up.

Derek gets out of the car and just walks the block until he sees the dirty windows, large and brown, on the other side of the street. The sign is already down. So long, coffee shop called just _Coffee_ , dreary and ugly as balls. Your life in this town was long and miserable, but-

The smell hits him when the door swings open, and thank God for were-speed. A fraction of a second – and he is safe, safe from whatever would follow.

Derek looks from around the corner, creeping in the upcoming shadows like a killer.

There _he_ opens the door, closes it using the key. Stares at the key in his hand for five seconds. Jerks suddenly and turns his head. He stands like this for a long time, and Derek, who is now two feet away from the corner, doesn’t even need to see this to know all the facial expressions that are now on _his_ face.

After a painful second of doubt, Derek runs to his car, accompanied by the loud noise of his blood pumping in his head and his ragged breathing.

 _I can’t, I can’t, I won’t_ , some part of Derek repeats it like a mantra the whole trip to the car. _I won’t, please, just stop. I can’t anymore, please stop this._

But there’s no use covering the wound with these paper-thin words. The wound doesn’t care for this meager shelter. It needs something meaty, something more real to start healing. Real like the jolt the man on the other side of the street felt right before turning unmistakably into the right direction. Real like the intense mix of sadness, pain and something much more horrible surrounding that man in that very moment.

 _Please_ , Derek says to no one in particular on his ride home. He’s not sure what he is asking for. If it is relief he seeks, he knows he won’t get it. Not this night, not this week, or month. Or life.


	2. Chapter 2

There is something astonishingly soothing about seeing Scott’s part-lost and part-angry face hovering somewhere above him, barely discernable in the dim light of the twilight. Stiles could even have a chuckle at the fondness the image raises in his heart.

Then the moment is gone, and Scott jumps up and away from his bed, eyes glaring, fangs out. Stiles props himself up on one elbow.

“Listen, I don’t want a fight right now.”

“Oh you don’t, do you?” Scott growls in a deep voice. Not one of a teenager Stiles once used to know and protect. Scott is fidgety, his body is shaking and moving on its own accord. Any person associating with werewolves knows this state as a signal to get your shit and head straight for the hills. The human is almost gone and the wolf is out. The human has trouble finding the words. “You- What the fuck are you- Just sit there, okay? Just sit, don’t move.”

Very slowly, like in his very first were-human fuckups, Stiles changes his position into a more comfortable one and crosses his legs to sit.

“Listen, Scott, I’m pretty sure your Alpha ordered you not to harm me in any way, so if you could put those claws away, that would be great, thank you.”

The mention of the Alpha works its magic, like it always does: Scott’s face goes long and unmistakably human at the remark. Thank God.

“You talked to Derek?”

The human voice is back, too. It’s not that different from the one Stiles remembers. Somehow this hurts way more than the wolfing-out.

“No,” he says carefully, “but I’m right, aren’t I? Anyway. What’s up?”

“ _’What’s up_?’” Scott coughs out, and his eyes go dangerously yellow again. “Are you fucking kid- _Stiles_ , did you hit your head or something? Why are you here?”

Stiles shifts on his bed. He has had so many versions of this conversation in his head that right now he can’t even remember the right order of his arguments. Behold the great silver tongue of Beacon Hills, the guy who once was good at something.

“It’s been a week, and you are only asking it now?”

Not the best move, but it’s something. Better than ‘What’s up’, anyway.

Scott is wearing a nice white button-down, Stiles notices only now. Another sign of times having moved on. And pants, Scott is actually wearing a grown-up outfit and he still climbed in through the window like some pathetic teenage wolf he once was. Well, in his defense, Derek was about the same age when he pulled that exact stunt.

Scott ignores the question and just keeps staring. That piercing gaze. So much condemnation. If Stiles were younger, it would destroy him.

“I just figured it was time I came home.”

“Home?” Scott half-chokes on the word. “It’s no home for you, Stiles, not anymore. It’s the Hale pack territory. You’re not Hale pack.”

“I am, technically,” Stiles raises his eyebrows, belatedly realizing he’s pleading. “I mean, I never-”

“Never abandoned your pack?” Scott cuts him. “Never disappeared into the night and ignored your pack for six straight years? Is that what you never did? Is that it, Stiles?!”

The last question is a real growl, and Scott cannot stop now. He lunges to the left, grabs Stiles’ backpack from the floor and pulls out a small leather bag and a gun.

 _Perfect_.

“Wolfsbane? Silver bullets? Really?!” Scott is hysterical now. Not good. “You came here to hunt us down? To finish what you started? Go ahead and try, you nutcase! I will personally rip your heart out and spit it out on your dad’s porch! Fucking liar!”

They both hear Dad walking up the stairs, and turn their heads to the door, then quickly back to each other. Scott throws the stuff on Stiles’ bed and croaks out once again, “You fucking liar, Stiles. Traitor. You should run back to where you’ve been hiding all these years before the Alpha gets serious about you.”

And just like that, he is gone seconds before the door opens and Dad pops in. His face turns white as he notices the gun lying on Stiles’ blanket.

“It’s okay, Dad. The gun’s mine.”

Dad’s face twists in a strange grimace, something impossible to decipher. Then he shuts the door and goes back downstairs.

When they eat their early breakfast, the only sounds are the toasts crunching and their throats gulping, Dad is the first one to burst the silence bubble.

“Scott finally come round?”

Stiles peers into his orange juice glass before replying.

“We talked.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“He got a little carried away.”

“Didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No.”

“Shame. You deserve it.”

“I know.”

Stiles makes coffee, and they savor it along with the aftertaste of the morning incident.

“Seen him and some other pals of yours hanging in the neighborhood a lot.”

“Yeah, I know.”

 _I can feel them_.

Coming and going, circling around like some brain-damaged birds. Angry, sad, frustrated. They don’t hate him though, and that’s a start.

“You still gonna ignore them?”

“It’s not me who is doing the ignoring, Dad.”

“You haven’t had the time to talk to Derek, and it’s been a whole week. If you do that and find common ground, they will follow, you know that.”

“I don’t want to talk to Derek, Dad.”

“Dick move, son.”

“Yes, I’m one hundred percent owning up to the dickery of that, Dad, thank you.”

It’s only seven when he gets to the place, and it’s already buzzing with life. People come in, have their coffee with an obscenely fresh bagel and get on with their morning routine. Some local joggers and bike riders pop in to buy a sports drink or a green smoothie to go, older folks leisurely read the newspaper in the straw chairs outside and trashtalk the youth between the pages. It’s a nice buzz, just the buzz he wants to hear in this place.

The town dynamics has changed a lot since he was last here. The fast pace of civilization has reached Beacon Hills, and every morning people are rushing into the world to cross out the million things on their to-do list for the day. It’s both sad and inspiring to see this New York style action in his home town.

 _Welcome to Overdrive_ , the hand-written sign on the door greets. _Get energized, go nuts!_

The door is new, and when Stiles pushes it in, it goes smoothly and quietly as opposed to the monstrosity that had been here before. How could the coffee place called _Coffee_ make any money anyway? That’s against the law of everything.

“Morning, boss,” Miranda greets him with a heartwarming shine of her picture-perfect teeth. She’s only sixteen, tender, hopelessly ginger, attractively geeky and thinks she’s in love. Stiles doesn’t really mind, so long as she does her job. “Can you believe we’re already out of the chocolate ones? They’re the big hit today. You think I should have them bring us some more?”

Stiles gauges the pastry left on the counter.

“Yes, better do that. We’re going to have some incoming at lunch, the folks might want them.”

“Will do!” she chirrups and disappears with her phone while Stiles takes her place at the counter.

Work sooths him. You must not be different for that, think about your emotions, expressing them or hiding them. It’s dull and monotonous and yet so satisfying to give people what they want and receive a smile in return. No worries. Just don’t forget to say _please_ and _thank you_.

He hangs around the place for another couple of hours talking with the locals, and then goes inside the room he turned into his office and skypes the guy who manages the original Overdrive back in LA. Things are going fine back there, nothing to worry about, but Stiles can feel tension.

“Just tell me what happened, Mark,” he sighs when he gets beyond tired of the fake smile.

“Well,” Mark hesitates. He is a nice guy, fresh and full of willingness to serve the right person. Stiles can’t blame him for the pathological desire to bring the good news only. “There has been sort of a. . . misunderstanding about three days ago. You see, these guys came looking for you, and-”

“How many?”

“Four, if memory serves. Three dudes, one girl. One middle-aged, sounded European, maybe German, I don’t know. But he spoke good English.”

Stiles doesn’t let the mask he usually reserves for customers slip off his face. _Everything is fine, thank you, what are you in the mood for today? Fantastic choice._ Keep doing just that and you’ll be fine.

“Did you tell them where I was?”

“Well, I said you were not living in LA anymore and that, er, that you moved back to your home town. Was I-” Mark cringes, and his big greasy nose twitches like a rat’s. “Was I not supposed to tell them that?”

Stiles heaves a weary sigh.

“No, man, it’s all good, don’t worry about that. Did they say anything else?”

“Well,” Mark’s eyes go completely blank, which is a tell-tale good enough for Stiles. “One of them, that German guy or whatever, said something really strange. I didn’t get it.”

“What?”

“He said. . . Hold on. He said something like, ‘Ah, the prodigal son. That makes matters easier.’ I think that was it, that’s exactly what he said, and then they just took off. I have no idea what that was about. Are they your friends back from your days in Europe?”

“More like business partners,” Stiles corrects automatically. “Thanks for telling me.”

When he ends the conversation, the mask slips off. Stiles stares into the screen of his laptop for so long that it turns black and he can see his reflection in it. It doesn’t look all that cheerful.

 

“So you know how Derek got our hands completely tied about the whole thing?” Boyd starts from afar, and Scott knows exactly where this is going.

He feels too hot and lazy to try and weasel his way out of this anyway.

“Dude, I know I broke the rule, don’t beat around the bush.”

Boyd and Danny, who are both stirring their coffees uneasily, exchange a meaningful look. They are a strange pair to be sitting together, what with Danny wearing his usual laid-back v-neck with a geeky print on it and Boyd in his New-York-style three-piece and his permanent bedroom stare. No wonder the waitress, a cute girl in a dark-green apron, keeps passing them in futile hopes of overhearing a thing or two. Scott almost feels invisible, but that might be his wedding ring working.

Boyd waits for the nosey waitress to cruise around their table again, and when she disappears behind the kitchen door, whispers, “We knew you’d been hanging around his house.” He looks around again, for the thousandth time. “And since Derek didn’t put your head on a spike for that, we figured me and Danny, we were allowed to do some digging of our own.”

This is where it’s Scott’s turn to play paranoid. It’s not like Derek would be hiding to eavesdrop on them, their Alpha is long past his stalker phase (here’s hoping), but one can never be too careful.

“And?”

Boyd lets Danny take the floor here. Danny the internet ninja. Danny who can find anything.

“He spent three years somewhere in Europe, hard to pinpoint where exactly,” Danny begins nonchalantly, as if finally being able to get his hands on Stiles’ whereabouts were not particularly pants-pissing thrilling to him. Showoff. “He didn’t use his passport or credit cards, which brings me to the conclusion he was messing with the wrong crowd the whole time. No official employment, a snotty eighteen-year-old – guys, come on. Fishy as hell.”

“No one’s ruling that out, man,” Scott urges. “What else?”

“Then he returned and opened a coffee place in LA, name’s Overdrive.”

“Didn’t take any bank loans or anything like that,” Boyd, who is a big banker now, butts in when he stops chewing his chocolate croissant for a moment. “Makes one’s mind wonder where the hell he got all the money.”

“The coffee business took off well and soon he opened in a bunch of other cities and towns all around California,” Danny adds. “Overdrive is slowly becoming a formidable force on the market. Not like they’re stepping on Starbucks’ toes or anything, but they’re pretty well-set here in the state.”

 “So what, is he filthy rich now?” This thought does not sit well with Scott. It doesn’t sit well with him at all because what Stiles Stilinski deserves is to burn in hell forever with no right of appeal, not fucking eat foie gras all day and wash it down with some fancy-ass cognac while enjoying an awe-inspiring view on the ocean. Or, whatever, live on his yacht or spit down on people from his penthouse. “That makes no sense. Why would he move back to his old house now?”

“Dunno,” Danny shrugs, “why is Mayor Stilinski still hanging on to it? Clearly he can do better now. Besides, I didn’t say he was rich, I just said that his business was doing fairly okay. He might be still injecting all the profit into the enterprise.”

“What, you mean you two didn’t stick your nose into his accounts? Come on.”

Boyd just shrugs, unimpressed as usual, “Didn’t seem to matter. We found out that he wasn’t here seeking help from his daddy or attempting to get back with the pack out of desperation. But if you ask me, I think it’s the smell that made him go back to that house, the familiarity. He’s showing Derek that he’s not here to take any of his territory, just reclaim what was originally his.”

“Yeah? Like he didn’t claim that awful coffee place already? Which is our territory too, in case you forgot.”

Boyd just treats him with another unimpressed shrug again, which is a regular chaperone to all his verbal communication. “Work is not home.”

“No shit, Confucius. But why go out of his way with all this? To what end? I don’t get him.”

Another shrug.

“You talked to him, you tell us. Did he smell regretful, miserable?”

Scott frowns. The sour face in the dim light of the early morning, the dry tone and, most importantly, the gun and the wolfsbane.

“I couldn’t read him, guys, sorry, I was just so freaking mad. He carries a gun loaded with silver bullets and wolfsbane in his backpack.”

Boyd just does his thing again, “No surprises here, he’s afraid we might do something to him. A guy has to protect himself.”

“No,” Scott shakes his head before he realizes it. “He didn’t seem afraid one bit even though I was all wolfed out right in front of his face, and he was just chilling in bed. I don’t think he’s afraid of us.”

“Not of you, obviously,” Danny butts in. “He knows you’ll never have it in you to harm him.”

“That’s where he’s wrong, I was actually ready to claw into his ribcage, like, I’m not even kidding right now.” Scott stumbles upon the next what he has to say. It seems all too personal somehow. “You didn’t see him, guys. His eyes. . . It’s like the old Stiles is dead and I don’t even know that new person.”

They keep quiet for a while, waiting for the waitress to take away their cups and bring the check. Boyd, being the pack’s treasurer, pays.

Scott works up the nerve to ask only when they’re already outside, strolling through the scorching day back to their human problems.

“Should we tell Derek?”

They just stare at him, hard enough for Scott to bite his tongue. Damn, he’s Chief Beta. How come he still feels like the baby of the group?

“Right. Of course. I’ll call him.”

“You can leave out the gun part,” Boyd says. “Derek doesn’t need another reason to be worried about, got enough on his plate right now.”

 

 

“Excuse me?”

The smell is unfamiliar. Not Beacon Hills, not any other nearby town. Derek still doesn’t give two shits. The inside of his glass seems all that much more exciting at the moment.

The guy slides onto the tall stool next to him. Rude.

“You’re Sheriff Hale, right? I never forget a face.”

 _And I never forget a smell_ , but this seems so insignificant at the moment.

Around him there’s loud wailing of the guitar solo and the gleeful, orgasmic yells from the crowd, mostly teenage girls. All those rapid heartbeats, mouths breathing in and screaming out. He cares more about that madness around the stage than he does about the foreign-smelling guy sitting to the right.

“Right,” the guy says. “What are you, chaperoning for those moppets? I didn’t know sheriffs did that.”

He doesn’t. Well, not on purpose anyway. This is his favorite bar, and it’s not his fault they sometimes let the local garage bands show what they’ve got to their fellow high schoolers. He’s not going to change his habits because of some foolish teenage gathering. Loud, sweaty, horny teenage gathering.

Not like this is new territory.

“Anyway, I see you’re not in the mood for chit-chat, so I’ll be quick.” A small pause follows, in which Derek inadvertently picks up a slight tingle of worry leak out of his neighbor. “Heard the Stilinski kid is back in town.”

Raising his head would tantamount to defeat, so he doesn’t, but the music and the screams suddenly just stop being there. This is great, sheriff, very mature reaction.

“I’ve recently returned back to Beacon Hills myself, and I remember the guy. I was still in town when he. You know.” More worry, this time with a trace of fear. Derek zeroes in on that fear. “We used to go to high school together, although we never actually spoke, so it doesn’t really count. But I figured, since he’s back in town and I’m back in town. . . Anyway, are you cool with that, Sheriff? I don’t want to get in the middle of anything, not that kind of dude.”

He smells of everything, that guy. A rental car, the woods, booze, a lot of sweat. Beacon Hills, where every corner carries the smell of the Hale pack, has not rubbed off on him yet, but there is something there. As if the guy actually made the effort of smelling normal and took a stroll through the local woods before approaching. Then again, the guy doesn’t smell in any way fishy (and by fishy he means werewolfy), why would he go to such lengths? That’s stupid.

“I mean, I know you and him were practically married and all, the whole town-”

“Stiles is not _mine_.”

The guy lets out a silly giggle, and Derek has a sudden urge to look up and see what his face looks like. He doesn’t. His drink is much more interesting than some moronic fuckface drooling over the town’s lost but found.

“Really? I mean, considering your history, I really don’t want to get in there if you feel like there’s the slightest-”

“I don’t care about it, go ahead. Date him, fuck him, marry him if you’re suicidal. He doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“You sure about that? Because back in the day the whole town was rock solid you saw him as the ultimate love of your life, man. No offence, you just gave off this possessive vibe, kind of scary, too. Like, forever and ever kind of crap. So he’s not _that_? Anymore?”

“No.”

“Not even a friend then? He’s not part of your group, you sure? I heard you shared a lot of close friends.”

Derek gulps down his drink and gets up.

“Stiles has no place in my group or in my life.”

 _Now fuck off_ , he finishes inwardly and heads straight for the door, where the night air is finally cool and fresh, and free from all the annoying sounds and all those buzzing questions. He can’t be that rude with people anymore, he’s someone in this town now. Someone everyone knows and looks up to.

 _And pities_ , a voice adds magnanimously in his head, but Derek doesn’t try and quench it. It’s Friday night, for Christ’s sake, he has all the right to brood just a little.


	3. Chapter 3

This is just childish.

The cold shoulder he expected. The threatening stalking and the weird night visits – too. But the hate mail is just bad form.

“Any cool ideas?” Miranda chirrups as she waltzes around with a dust mop in her hands. When she does that after the shift when the day is almost dead and the night is creeping in, add her happy humming and the baby face and voila, a living Cinderella from that old cartoon. Stiles likes that about her. Miranda knows about him more than an employee probably should, but people talk and this sweet kid doesn’t listen.

Stiles browses through the rest of the letters he shook out of the suggestion box just now, when the last customer left. He can tell without even unfolding them which ones are from his pack. He will sneak them under his shirt and haul away like some lunatic who hides useless stuff, and he will read them in his office, alone.

After all, a douchebag of his caliber cannot be called so enough.

“I wonder what it’s like,” Miranda says casually, editing out the latest part of an inner dialog she must have been having with her boss all along. “To be managing a business.”

“It’s pure hell, don’t even think about it,” Stiles only half-jokes and then turns to her, a letter in his hand. “This one says we should establish margarita night. What do you think?”

She wrinkles her profusely freckled nose, “This place is not a bar. Different crowd.”

“Right you are, m’lady.” He turns back to the counter where all the other messages from his compatriots lie all scattered. So many of them, so few he actually wants to read. “I have another idea. We could make a weekly game night, you know, for teens mostly, but no alcohol. I don’t want to get in trouble with the police. Not the sheriff’s son anymore.”

Miranda doesn’t even flinch, but of course he knows where her thoughts inadvertently take a turn. She can’t help it, it’s all around town, like a big old contagious disease.

 _Sheriff’s ex_ , they all call him when they think he can’t hear.

“Yeah,” she forces a smile, and by God is he grateful for the effort. “I’ll bring all my friends. They won’t be happy about the no-booze policy, but they’ll show up. We’ve been talking about finding a new hangout spot anyway.”

“Cool, bring them. We’ll have a party. Hey, do you happen to know where-” he starts to say when the first one swooshes right past his ear and absolutely eradicates a cookie jar sitting on the shelf behind the counter.

The sound follows, and the splinters glittering in the yolk-yellow light scatter all around the floor along with the brownish circles of cinnamon cookies running for their lives. The next one sticks right in the middle of the black chalkboard menu and kills the second O in _Chocolate Éclair_.

They don’t scream. At first, they just stare at each other very intently, as if asking, _Did you do this just now? Was it you?_ It is when the glass breaks, the one on which Stiles had a local artist draw a really cute couple sharing a cappuccino (the sun above them looked a little boozed, but the couple didn’t seem to mind and neither did Stiles), does Miranda hit the panic button.

She turns her head to where the glass was just now, face horribly twisted and pained, and utters this ultrasound shriek only certain women can pull off, and the mop is still clutched in her white fingers like the only shield. She shakes visibly but makes no effort to hide or at least drop down on the floor. She just stands there and shakes like the most stubborn suicider, and keeps yelling.

That awful shaky sound.

Slowly, as if locked in the room filled with clay instead of air, Stiles gets up on his wobbly legs, and this is when the real meaning of the phrase _cold feet_ gets to him. His feet are icy, and so is the big-eyed, childworthy terror, the kind that remains ever unexplained or faced, hiding inside his ribs and clinging to them, the worst possible barnacle ever.

The bullets keep hitting, causing carnage and methodically destroying everything that has been created here, in the small and once cheerful piece of his home town, and Stiles knows exactly what to do now.

 

 

To the people who were in the room, it seem as if something just stung the sheriff right in the nerve and he bolted, shocked with pain and the urgency to break free from it. The same thought lands in the minds of most of his staff when they see him doggedly rushing straight for the exit, eyes bottomless pits of worry, body impossibly tense. When the phones on their desks start ringing all at once - a disrupted swarm - the sheriff is already long gone.

 

“Get in,” Derek barks out when he stops the car right in front of Scott. The beta, who has obviously been running through the whole town, hops in promptly and sniffs the air. It gives him nothing to melt the confused expression on his face.

“I don’t know either,” Derek admits, not quite sure if this is good strategy to own up to one’s lack of knowledge to the face of his most trusted beta, when his phone rings.

It’s the station. He listens to the quick report, silently checking the words with the consuming feeling inside, the one that made him jump up in the middle of an important meeting with the mayor and his people and just _run_.

It adds up.

“Send everyone,” he commands finally and hangs up.

Scott is fidgeting on his seat like a dog at six o’clock in the morning whose human is too lazy to realize that it’s pee time.

“A shooting?” he parrots in a half-stutter. “Is he alive?”

Derek just stares at him, and Scott casts his eyes down in shame. It has been so many years, and Scott still cannot trust his wolf instincts fully, what a scandal. Guess it _is_ right what they say: only a born wolf is the real deal.

They spot Boyd already on sight, surrounded with a small crowd of concerned rubbernecks. Danny comes not long after, and so does Lydia. The other members of the pack - the new ones, not from _before_ \- are in the crowd too, but they don’t even feel like they have the right to stand in the front row. Derek approves of that and sends everyone a _thank you_.

Scott is right by his side when Derek enters the place which only ten minutes ago was, Derek hates to admit, the cutest coffee place in town. It’s not radically different – no blood-curdling scenes of decapitated bodies spread all around the floor or anything gruesome like that, but Derek does smell blood.

He looks at the girl who works here, what’s her name. He looks at the badge. Miranda. She is still crouching behind the counter as if expecting more bullet showers to hit, and when she finally sees a uniformed man, she gives out a loud cry, desperate, happy, completely wrecked, and practically runs into Derek’s arms.

What she is saying is pure gibberish, a non-quenching series of sounds and parts of words that only make sense in her head, but Derek doesn’t need words. He sees, feels, senses.

The blood is not Miranda’s, she is perfectly intact. Physically. When the first patrol car pulls up and two cops hurry out, Derek hands the poor girl to them and does the only thing he both wants and dreads to do now. He heads for the owner’s office.

A strange vertigo succumbs him for the briefest of moments when he sees the back of that head. Over the past week Derek has studied it dozens of times, sneakily, from afar and more often than he cares to admit, but only upon seeing it up close does the reality slap-awaken him – and suddenly everything inside him falls.

 _There it is_. Another landmark on the long and perilous path of his life that snaps it into two parts: before and after. First there was only one: before the fire and after. Then there was another: before Stiles left and after. Now there’s the third.

The head of the person sitting on the floor in an awkward position, a hand pressed to his left forearm, jerks up, and the worst part is happening now.

 _His_ eyes are not the same at all. The old Stiles is not even in the back seat – he is just gone. The lights are out, the book is finished, closed and burnt. So is everything that made Stiles before, or so it seems now, when the impossible, insufferable staring contest begins.

 _Fucker_ , Derek wants to say but ends up thinking it as he takes in the abnormally pale skin and the bloody sleeve bandaged poorly with a once-white table cloth, inhales the thick blood-filled air saturating the room. _Couldn’t live a week without getting yourself shot. Idiot._

They don’t say anything when Derek drops to his knees and immediately starts dragging away the pain from the wound. The touch is excruciating, enraging. Derek wants to hit something, punch a hole in a wall maybe. Instead he dutifully drains and drains and drains until he sees some color on those cheeks.

The sounds grow louder outside as more and more people file in, and when Derek is done and comes carefully up, Stiles hanging on to him with the left part of his body limp and listless, he can finally feel his whole pack in the same area. They all came, the old and the new ones. An untimely thought captures Derek mid-step, _Can he feel all of them? Can he feel the ones who came after?_

Strange, but Derek doesn’t even register the body contact until Stiles is already inside the ambulance and a nurse is checking his arm. Derek is right outside, standing there like a lost and socially awkward tourist in a city of a much bigger size than he’s used to, and he can’t shake the ghost feeling of the touch. His wolf demands to jump right into that car and stay close, help, mark, protect. He stays put instead. _People_ will take care of _people_ , that’s how it’s supposed to go.

 _But he’s not exactly human, is he?_ A voice inside him wonders, and that’s when Derek raises his head and looks into the weary and impossibly grownup face of his Second.

_How did you do that?_

Stiles’ lips twitch a little, and oh how pale they are again. They should hurry, what the hell still keeps them waiting? They have to go.

Before long, Derek finds himself in the company of Scott, Boyd and Lydia - his most trusted, most wanted right now. Suddenly, to his great shame, a wave of incompatible loss almost knocks him off his feet and rips him open, and he cannot, is not allowed to feel – hell, even think that, - but right here and right now all he craves is the company of another wolf, _born_ wolf. If only Laura. . .

They cast him strange glances, even Lydia, and he quenches the whimpering feeling. God, he is such an asshole alpha sometimes.

 “Okay, did everybody feel it?” Boyd whispers almost inaudibly. “Because I sure as hell felt it. Knocked me off my chair, that thing. Some powerful stuff.”

“Can he do that?” Scott asks with his face long and offended. “Was it some creepy voodoo shit or was that? . .”

“Later,” Derek barks and leaves them be for a while. Right now he has to be with another kind of pack – the shepherds protecting the herbivorous herd.

 _Hah_ , the voice inside his head muses, and a flashback from another world pops up before his inner eye, unwanted. Gruesome.

The one where he vividly remembers his blood actually curdling inside his veins with tremendous awe that he could not, would not resist. Atop of that, which seemed much worse for his human self and _oh so satisfying_ for the wolf – atop of all that fear and respect was enormous, colossal pride.

That is exactly what he felt at the end of their long night of hunting when his Second had his hand clenched tightly on their pack’s sworn enemy’s throat and slowly squeezing the last flicker of light out of the foe’s eyes. His heart rate serial-killer steady. His eyes glowing. Face beaming with calm, innocent joy.

Stiles? Herbivorous? Hardy har har, ladies and gentlemen. If there is, or has ever been, one really good wolf in Derek’s new pack – the kind that possessed almost or even exactly the same mindset as the born wolf – it is his damned, no-good, lying Second.

 

Scott doesn’t even turn his head when the peace of his hideout in the excellent shade of the neighbors’ hedge is shattered by the presence of another. He doesn’t register his packmate, but he is relieved.

 _I am not the only village idiot around here_.

“Well,” Boyd shrugs as if it were totally okay to read someone’s thoughts, “I think today proves that he is still pack. Kind of.”

Scott mumbles something even he doesn’t understand. They stand like this and hypnotize the window on the other side of the street for a long time. Several cars pass by, but not too many – the people must still be pretty bummed out about the shooting, nobody wants to get in the way of some psycho with a gun.

Suddenly Scott catches himself wondering how cool it would be if they both smoked. They would just stand there for hours, dragging on their respective coffin nails, two red lights in the ocean of black, moving, communicating, creating a story of their own. And in the morning, when the vigil was over, the hedge owner would find a neat pile of what was left of the night soldiers lying there, on the ground, still saving the taste of confusion and the terrible mix of feelings on the ends.

A small snort escapes him before he can catch it and shove it back. Seriously though, this is hilarious. Look at them trying to act all tough nuts, like a fifthgrader holding a cigarette fished out of his dad’s pack. _I’m gonna do it,_ he says to his friends _. I’m gonna light it, you just watch me_.

Not very cool? Exactly.

“I bet he can feel us, too,” Boyd speculates lazily with his eyes focused on the warmly-lit rectangle of the window. “Do you think he still has the- you know. _That thing_.”

“Doubt it,” Scott shrugs, and is immediately reminded of that fifthgrader again. _Chicken shit, just say you’ve never done it before, just say you’re scared_. “After so many years? And besides, Derek has had. . . After him. . .”

“It’s not relevant. Nothing matters compared with the connection of mates. Doesn’t matter who you do it with or who you end up with in the end. It’s just. . . So bleak – all the rest. Commonplace. For me, it’s like doing a chore.”

Scott falls respectfully silent. He hasn’t thought of Erica in such a long while that it makes him uneasy but not particularly guilty. Erica was not his mate after all, nor was she his pack at the time. He can’t possibly feel anything deep for her.

 _Ha, take that, you little fucker_ , he says vindictively to the fifthgrader with the cigarette. _I told the truth for once. I’ve one-upped you._

And just like that, the avalanche of all things true and hidden breaks through the barriers inside him and he cannot – will not thwart it.

“I’m fucking afraid of him. Afraid that he still has so much power over me. It’s insane. I want to bash his face in, I do – I’ve never been so fucking furious in my life, and I’m afraid I won’t be able to follow through because he will just stare down the shit out of me and I just won’t do anything, I’ll just crawl into the corner and whine like a puppy and _beg_ for mercy. Shit, _shit_ , Boyd, he betrayed everyone, he _abandoned_ his pack, and I am still fucking _afraid_ of the guy, and I still want to offer my life to him and protect him as if he were my Second!”

Boyd doesn’t say anything for a long while. So long that the warm-lit window goes dark and the homewrecking monster behind it has gone to bed, still torturing everyone even in his sleep. So long that the words fade into the air and become irrelevant, stale, boring. So long that Scott even has time to feel sorry for the unappreciated outburst of candor.

“I’m pretty solid everyone knows by now that he still is our Second, Scott,” is what Boyd says eventually, and Scott nods.

There is simply nothing else to say, so they keep poring over the lifeless window till someone else comes to stand the vigil. Which they will.


	4. Chapter 4

“It’s so nice to finally see you, Stiles. The folks who tune in regularly have been bugging me for days to give you a call. So yeah, thanks for not blowing me off, I know you don’t like publicity much.”

“It’s nice to be here, Robert, I really appreciate you inviting me here. You know, for someone who grew up in this town, someone as nosy and insufferable as I was as a kid (ask my dad)-”

“Ha ha!”

“-I’m surprised I never got to see your station on the inside. I’d have made such a good co-pilot, too.”

“You bet, my man. Rejoice, dreams do come true!”

“Thanks, Universe.”

“Ha. But okay, in all seriousness, on behalf of all our listeners I thank you for making this time for us. The first thing people are dying to know is how are you feeling? Does the arm hurt?”

“Well, it’s still a challenge to button up my shirt in the morning and I can’t do any pushups or other both-arms-related routine, but all in all it’s good. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night from searing pain, if that’s what you want to know, Robert.”

“That’s a relief to know. Still no intel on the douchebag who did it?”

“No, but I’m sure the police are doing their best.”

“You bet. Nobody wants to piss off the mayor’s son. Which reminds me, do you think it has any relation to your old man’s position here?”

“I highly doubt that. My dad has been serving this town for decades now, and I have real trouble imagining that someone would do such a stupid thing just to get back at him. I mean, if there were a real villain, like, this really bad guy or a street gang having beef with the cops, they would have gotten the job done properly, you know what I mean? And that was just some stupid prank gone wrong. I don’t even think the shooter was aiming at me specifically.”

“You never know. What if it were someone you rejected in high school? Some jacked-up in the head loner building up hate for years, that sort of thing. I mean, the world’s a crazy place, right?”

“Nah. I didn’t really date much in high school-”

“Yeah, about that, our listeners keep asking-”

“-and as for the local kooks, the police have already cleared them all. And besides, where would they have gotten silver bullets?”

“That’s actually another thing people are very curious about. It was said that some of the bullets were made of silver, is that really true? The police were vague about the whole matter.”

“Six of the bullets they found on the scene were silver, yes. The other ones were regular steel.”

“And the caliber?”

“The same, niners, but shot from different guns.”

“So that means there were two offenders?”

“It’s a theory, but nothing solid yet.”

“What do you think? I mean, you were _there_ , you must have picked something up.”

“Believe it or not, Rob, but I was mostly just scared shitless. Oh, can you say that on the air?”

“Anything for you, Stiles.”

“Gee, what an honor. Anyway, I don’t even remember how I got into my office and if it was me who had bandaged the wound. I frankly cannot recall doing it.”

“That’s heavy. So how is your involvement with the investigation going? Did they at least give you security detail?”

“What? No way, ha ha. My dad tried to assign a guard for me, but really, this is such gigantic overkill. I don’t think it was anything more than a one-time thing. Just some guy pissed off at me for taking away their clientele or something.”

“ _Just some guy_ with silver bullets to spare?”

“I have no explanation for that. If it was some reference I was supposed to get, I didn’t.”

“You mean no one has terrorized you with werewolf jokes yet?”

“That’s the thing – no one! I mean, what is wrong with you people? It’s practically gift-wrapped!”

“They’re just scared of the mayor’s son.”

“I have never met a person who was scared of me, Robert. Just don’t have it in me, I guess.”

 

“If it weren’t such a washed-out cliché, saying that you look like shit would be an appropriate conversation starter.”

She doesn’t even have the energy to look offended, but they both know it’s true. Lydia has always had a thin face with protruding cheekbones, but lately her cheeks have fallen in, and that paleness. Her only salvation is her supreme make-up skills, and yet Stiles can see from a mile away how troubled and frail she has become.

He keeps walking, a phone in one hand, flipping through New York Times articles casually, the other hand buried deep in his pocket. His pace is steady, slow even, and yet she stubbornly doesn’t break the ten-foot distance she established from the beginning.

“Got something to say, Lyds?” he calls.

“Don’t call me that, moron.”

This is the first time a pack member has spoken to him since the shooting, which happened two weeks ago. And that really shouldn’t make him so happy, but it really does.

“If you want to have a normal, adult conversation, you can just walk with me. Or is it just your turn to be on Stiles duty? I thought you guys were trying to keep it a secret.”

“ _Please_ ,” she snorts. He imagines her rolling her eyes at that, and smiles surreptitiously. “We knew you knew.”

“Why hide then?”

“Maybe we didn’t want to see your stupid face up close.”

“Fair enough.”

They keep walking like this, as if they were a couple and they had just had a fight and both were too much of drama queens to make the first step.

Beacon Hills is only waking up at this hour. There are some early joggers and dog walkers, lone cars disrupting the serene air of the still-sleeping town with their engines that sound too damn loud. They haven’t met many people since Stiles left the house and Lydia fell on his tail, which makes both of them feel like these empty streets were a safe place to talk about _the things_. Stiles resists it as long as he can, but the NYT is not having an exceptionally exciting day today and the hollow cheeks on that face still worry him.

“Derek tell you to protect me?”

“Didn’t have to,” Lydia retorts, and there is so much venom and hurt in that response. Oh how much she must hate him, that human girl forced to feel like a wolf for a second.

“I’m sorry,” he says to the empty street before him, in a cracked voice that he doesn’t even recognize, and then listens for the steps behind.

They slow down a little, then regain their pace. Stiles contemplates turning, right now. Facing her. How great it would feel to finally tell someone the truth, at least this once. His inner chicken gets the better of him, though, and he just keeps walking. Clears his throat.

“I didn’t mean to cause you guys any inconvenience. Really, tell Derek to call it off, I’m fine.”

“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” voice still venomous.

“In fact, I’m going to the station later today, so I just as well might.”

He almost feels cheated when he turns the corner and sees the door of Overdrive five feet away. He was foolishly hoping for at least one more minute of this - whatever it might be.

She waits a few feet behind as he fumbles for the keys in the back pocket of his black denims, and when the padlock clicks and gapes open, making it look like it’s having the biggest yawn of its life, Lydia says something very strange.

“You don’t even know how much trouble you brought along with yourself, Stiles. You have no idea.”

Partially he understands. The betas’ insatiable need to care for the Second, the instinct to hold on to what was once lost, no matter the circumstances. They are going to keep coming and keep following him around until he does one of the two: either he, somehow, gets officially accepted into the pack again or he gets exiled, this time by the pack.

He holds on to the door handle as an image of Derek’s face from the day of the shooting appears before him. The eyes, large, terrified, hurt. No, six years ago Derek was left too fucked-up, he’s not strong enough to resist the temptation to get at least some of his former self back. That means no exile for his trouble-making trainwreck of a Second, not now, not ever. Stiles can keep being the biggest asshole in the universe, he can kill and eat infants out of their mothers’ split-open bellies or do whatever – Derek will abhor him, sure, but he will suffer through every act of ultimate fuckery Stiles will dish out, and he will _never_ let go anymore.

Coming back to Beacon Hills was a huge mistake.

“Why don’t you come in with me and tell me all about this trouble you’re so worried about?” he tells her in an almost normal voice and pushes the door open. That’s when the detonator works.

 

They try to speak in hushed voices, but Derek can still hear them without so much as straining a muscle. Sitting in his chair, he wonders idly how it would feel to find out that your boss the sheriff has been aware of every single behind-the-back conversation happening at the station the whole time. Every not-so-secret affair, every disgruntled _asshole_ , muttered under the breath.

That must be so embarrassing. He hopes these people will never find out. They are, after all, good, honest folk, picking up what’s on the surface and prone to passing quick judgment just like everybody else.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, really, you guys.”

“Look at you, where are your eyebrows, boy? And your face looks like you’ve been through a grinder or something.”

“Linda, come on, that’s inappropriate. Guy’s been through enough, you wanna make him feel even worse?”

“But seriously, how come he’s walking like this like it’s no big deal? I told the Sheriff the boy needed security detail, and you remember what he said?”

“No, Linda, you got it all wrong. It was me who refused, not Derek. He actually wanted to house-arrest me until it was all sorted out, and so did my dad. I’m the idiot here.”

“You just don’t get it, Stiles! If Sheriff Hale really wants something, he gets it done. Doesn’t seem like he was all too eager to protect you after all.”

“No, _no_. Guys, please don’t make him the bad guy here.”

“Someone should! He’s the sheriff, you’re just a guy who runs a coffee shop. It’s not rocket science, Stiles.”

“Come on, you guys, don’t hate your boss for my sake. He was doing the best he could, it’s all on me. Really.”

“Hale – _sheriff_. Stiles – _coffee shop guy_. It’s _not_ on you, you soft-hearted buffoon.”

Stiles bites his tongue, but Derek can feel him cowering at that. So much guilt and shame inside. Where did that come from? And why is he so damn sure the explosion was his fault just like the shooting? Doesn’t make sense, considering that forensics (and Derek’s pack) found traces of wolfsbane in the device that ruined Overdrive’s entrance earlier this morning and effectively prevented the pack from sniffing around. Only an idiot would not see who’s the real target here, and Stiles is not an idiot.

Derek can feel his trepidation on the other side of the door, and can’t help thinking in a sudden fit of anger, _What is this show? You and I both know I can feel that._

When Stiles does open it and gets up, his face is stonewall cold, and he really is missing some hair, mostly in the front and in the eyebrow area. His forehead and cheeks are all red with scratches, and his neck is covered with a thick bandage. Derek can feel blood oozing from the wound, and it doesn’t help soothe the anger.

“Sheriff,” Stiles says with a curt nod and then shuts the door behind him.

The wolf inside Derek wants many things right now. So many things. What bothers the wolf most is the state of Stiles’ neck, and Derek realizes that if he doesn’t let loose this one time, the wolf will drive him crazy.

He gets up and quickly covers the distance between them, grabs Stiles by the shoulders and presses their bodies together. For this short giddy moment, they fit just like before, just like always. Stiles hisses when Derek rubs his face against the stupid bandage, and the wolf lets out an apologetic whine.

“Speak quietly, they’re listening,” Derek whispers, face still pressed into the bandage. He has already started sucking the pain away. It takes more focus than it used to, now that his Second is literally in his face with his scent and his everything.

“You don’t have to do this,” Stiles whispers back, his hands still hugging Derek’s back, the hurt one weaker than the other one. “I’m fine, really.”

Derek doesn’t answer. He doesn’t stop either until every last droplet of pain is out of Stiles’ system. Only then does Derek let him sit and returns to his desk, his walk a little uneven. Too much too fast is never good, not to mention he doesn’t feel any closer or calmer. He is still plenty angry.

“So,” he says staring into Stiles’ now much healthier-looking face. (At least the wolf is a little happier now that he can see the result of his work.) “You know something.”

 Stiles shrugs noncommittally, and oh how typical is this.

“Your town, Sheriff.”

“It was fine before you moved back in.”

“I don’t remember Beacon Hills ever being fine, actually.”

“ _Stiles_.”

This tone that he inadvertently took reminds him of the old sheriff, the typical good guy whose teenage son would drive him up the wall with his constant lies.

 _Perfect_ , Derek sighs inwardly, _now I’m the parent_.

He tries again, this time with more intent.

“Stiles, who did you bring on this territory? Tell me now. It doesn’t concern just you, it’s pack business.”

Stiles – the _fucker_ – raises his almost-obliterated eyebrows in an obvious _Oh really?_ and Derek doesn’t know why he says it.

“You’re not pack now. But you’re also not _not_ pack. If you brought someone along with you who is a threat to this pack and this community, it is your duty to inform me.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Stiles says with a sweet little smile of a teenage school shooter, and Derek’s wolf growls. He forgot that he is not dealing with the old Stiles now. The old Stiles was so oblivious to everyone else’s scents and emotions that it was criminally easy to fool him. The new Stiles doesn’t take shit like that.

“Sheriff,” Stiles puts his healthy elbow on the desk and moves closer, eyes never leaving Derek’s, “you know as well as I do that if it were me who brought this party here, I would be already standing on my knees begging you and the rest to please-please-please protect me. I’m human, my dad’s human. I’m aware of my weakness. But this is clearly some pack matter, and your enemies are actively using me to get back at you and your crowd. Is Peter still alive, by the way?”

Derek leaves this unanswered.

“That’s why I expect you and the rest to get your act together and deal with this as is your duty. I understand that you don’t want to have anything to do with me personally, and that’s fine, I’m not exactly going out of my way to please you either. I’m living my life and you’re living yours, let it be just that.”

He hesitates for a second, and Derek is absolutely sure both of them are remembering their first seconds in this office – clutching one another like there’s no tomorrow, their scents a familiar mix, bodies pressed just perfectly together. He doesn’t know how to interpret that.

“I don’t want you to make any effort to tolerate me or be my friend right now,” Stiles finds his bitch voice again. “All I’m asking is for your pack to prevent me from having to suffer for _your_ shortcomings. I might not live through the next one.”

He gets up purposefully, and Derek growls before his brain gets the memo.

“ _Sit_!”

They all hear it. There is a mild commotion outside the door, someone is plotting a rescue mission. Stiles sits back down, and his lips spread in this unpleasant, evil grin Derek hasn’t ever seen before.

“Guess my body still sees you as the Alpha,” he comments jokingly, but his eyes are cold.

Derek takes a deep breath, which does not soothe him at all.

“All right,” he says, looking pointedly at the wall to his left. “Here’s the deal. We might have an idea who it is, but the problem is that we know their scent. My guys have been all around town this week, looking for it, and it’s just not there. I had Allison checking, er, something, and she said the suspects were fine and very much away from our territory. Most of them anyway.”

“You mean there’s a hostile pack and Allison is with them? Do you take me for a total clod, Derek?”

“No. No, I mean. Allison is really with them, now. It’s complicated. But she’s fine, she’s in our pack.”

“What do those guys have against us?” It makes Stiles shiver with annoyance when he hears his own blunder, but he doesn’t correct himself and neither does Derek.

“We had an alliance of a sort. But now with you back, their Alpha must feel threatened.”

“You mean their Alpha is the mother of Talia?” Stiles says like it’s the most typical thing to say, just a pause-filler between topics.

Derek freezes in his chair, mortified, waiting for something. A casual shrug and a smile is not something he quite expects.

“That’s right, I know. Been in town for weeks now, people talk. So am I endangering your girl’s life by sticking around? Shit, now Lydia’s words from earlier today make total sense. Is there going to be a war over Talia?”

Derek remains cautiously quiet and just waits. What else does this new, eerie Stiles know?

“But why didn’t they just rip me apart somewhere in the woods? You know I run pretty deep, sometimes at night, they’ve had a million chances. Why bother with all the gangster drama? None of which was meant to kill me anyway.”

 _You mean I hallucinated all of this?_ Derek wants to say but instead just points to Stiles’ mutilated arm, which still obviously hurts and barely functions.

“Not lethal. Just a warning.”

“I have no reason to suspect Anna of trying to chase you out of town or to start a war,” Derek answers coldly, and he truly believes that. Anna might be a little too fond of the idea of their packs merging and them living a big happy family, but she was aware of Derek’s mate situation when they first met and she didn’t seem bothered. Surely a thought must have crossed her mind that Stiles might return one day. Surely.

“Anna the Alpha?” Stiles specifies, and oh look, the bitch voice is back. Wonderful, at least now Derek knows that the new Stiles has feelings. “Is she the jealous type?”

“I don’t really know her,” Derek says into his lap, face down. “We haven’t spent much time together over the years.”

“That’s a lie,” Stiles practically relishes in this. Then he kicks back in his chair, his grin almost casual. “But you don’t have to lie to me. I have no right to pass judgment.”

“That’s right, you don’t.”

Stiles lets his guard down for only a second, but this second is enough for Derek to take in everything he needs to, hastily, like a thief.

“I’m not mad at you anymore, you know,” he says quietly, looking down, pushing his stare into his open palms lying in his lap and somehow feeling guilty for being the first one to open a can of worms. “For leaving.”

The silence that follows is deafening and feels so very wrong, but Derek does not, will not look.

“That’s,” Stiles swallows audibly, as if his throat has suddenly gone dry, “another lie.”

“No. I’m not mad about the past. It’s been six years, I’m not that petty and you must have had your reasons. I’m mad about you coming back, though. You must understand.”

“I don’t, really. I have no clue whatsoever how it must feel, and I won’t pretend to. I have fucked you up before and I keep doing that over and over again. I will, too. I won’t stop, Derek. Didn’t you hear them outside? Your people going for me, the little idiot who left, and shitting all over their trusted, no-surprises boss, the protector of this land. That’s me working my magic right there. They love me, they _hate_ you. Ye olde Stiles Stilinski: shits where he eats since birth, thank you very much.”

That makes Derek look. Just a quick peek to see if maybe that new cyborg Stiles is gone. No such luck, the eyes are still foreign and cold. Only the voice is a fraction different – slightly more human. He smells differently, too, when he gets into the skin of this tough-guy trainwreck bitch persona. He smells like despair and guilt.

“I don’t care what they think of me,” Derek articulates carefully. “For all I know, they might be right and I should have insisted on security detail. Moreover, I should have been there personally to-”

“You owe me nothing, Derek, come on!” Stiles yells suddenly and with such purpose that it makes Derek wince.

There’s another shuffle behind the door, but the two inside pay no heed. A staring contest of a sort is playing out, and Derek cannot stop looking – now that he has finally seen something genuine in this ridiculous caricature of a person, he will not let that go.

Stiles’ eyes start glittering in the scarce light of the room. He looks terrified and utterly lost with those horribly wounded, tear-verge eyes, and Derek’s heart skips a beat, and he hates it for this stupid, trite reaction.

 _This is so cruel_ , he thinks to himself, not realizing what he is talking about, and then, all of a sudden, a decision is shaped out in his head.

“Come to the pack meeting tonight,” he says in a firm voice, the Alpha voice which Stiles cannot resist. “The house, around nine. You can bring some good coffee.”

He then stands up and very obviously escapes to the window, asininely staring out of it until he hears the door open and close. Then – a swarm of concerned whispers, the familiar voice placating them. Withdrawing.

Somehow this feels like a victory, although Derek has no idea to what end.

 

The pack has not been so confused in so many years they don’t even know how to behave anymore. An inadequate assemblage of perplexed, angry, frustrated beasts. Derek doesn’t blame them lying in wait for something horrendous to happen. After all, this is all terribly perplexing to him as well, and he’s the goddamned Alpha, he’s supposed to know better.

But the matter is, nothing, not his background and certainly no werewolf manners and etiquette guide could have prepared him for the pickle his pack is now in. It would be bad enough if they were all humans. Humans tend – in fact, strive – to suture the old wounds quickly and efficiently, and then pretend it didn’t happen, especially the friends of those who got hurt. It’s multiple times worse when you have a pack of creatures with super olfaction who can not only see the train wreck site but inadvertently feel through it. If Derek hadn’t been raised in such conditions, he would feel exposed.

  The rookies, those who don’t remember the times when Stiles was around, just cast sideways glances at Stiles, who is sitting, relatively calm, in his place next to Derek and doesn’t smell like pack anymore. There is a lot of Derek to his smell though, and that is why he is earning so much mixed attention from the rookies.

“Stiles will be joining us today,” is all Derek says on the matter (Lydia scoffs; Scott looks betrayed; Boyd and Danny exchange an inside glance; Isaac, the fucker, gives Stiles a mock salute and then turns away, making a face), after which he, for a second sounding panic-struck, presses on to the issue.

While Derek is talking, giving everyone the details of the attacks and sharing his ideas about Anna, Stiles takes his time to study the extended pack. He counts thirteen, excluding him and Allison. Without the core group, the ones who were already there before his hectic leave, there are seven new members, five of which are werewolves. Stiles makes eye contact with a young girl, probably still a minor, and the look she gives him – intrigued and, one could argue, warm – does something inside his chest.

He shuts his eyes and tries to get a feel of these newcomers. (Or is he the newcomer here?) He learned the trick from a witch who shared a prison cell with him back in London, where he also learned that it’s true what they say about going up the river: you have lots of time to hone the old and develop new skills there.

Not all of the rookies are, in fact, new to the concept. The girl and two others used to be human less than a year ago, but the other two werewolves came from another pack, also not long ago. Was it a premeditated decision to expand the pack or did anything happen? Stiles turns to Derek, who is still talking, and uses that special little technique to get an inside feeling of Derek too. He has to wade through all the bitterness and repressed pain to get to what he wants, but now he knows: Derek was feeling insecure about signing an alliance treaty with Anna’s pack, who was a much better-standing Alpha than him at the time. He needed reassurance just in case, and so he reached out.

 _I wonder what they know about that Anna person_ , Stiles catches himself thinking as he tries to decipher the faces before him (the pack sits mostly on the floor, some of them use chairs, but mostly they just like looking up at Derek, seeing him above; it’s funny somehow but seems right nonetheless). _Have they all met her? How is she with Talia? How often does the girl visit her other family? What is going to happen when Anna finds out about their suspicions? Should I tell them now?_

The last question makes him flinch, and Derek stops to give him a firm look – _Do not interrupt the Alpha_ – but Stiles can see beyond that, and the concern he can fish out of Derek’s eyes is not comforting at all. It’s also almost disappointingly easy.

 _I shouldn’t be doing this_ , he is thinking while struggling to get his heartbeat down. _Sitting here in the Second’s place. Smelling like Derek’s secret. Making him be aware of me._

“Is Allison going to be here soon?” Scott takes the floor when Derek makes it clear he is done.

Derek shakes his head, “She wanted to take Talia with her, but there were. . . complications. She is still negotiating Talia’s whereabouts for the following month.”

“It’s our month,” Scott rebukes and gives Stiles an angry look which no one understands.

“I know, Scott, but Beacon Hills is not exactly the safest place at the moment, you have to understand.”

“You mean they are still pretending all this Stiles jealousy fit wasn’t her doing?”

Derek utters a low growl, making them all shudder and go eerily quiet. Silence follows, and Stiles has enough time to squeeze a thought in.

_What’s Scott’s beef with me? Apart from. . . everything._

Suddenly, as Derek is just about to answer (probably about them not having solid evidence again – he is like your typical old-timer professor, takes some sickly pride in reiterating), everyone can hear a high, lonely howl somewhere in the woods surrounding the Hale house.

In a split second, the wolves are on their feet, alert, the humans following closely behind.

“Halt,” Derek commands as one of the rookie wolves looks just about to take off aimlessly. He walks over to the front door, the rest following him a bit hesitantly, and then turns, a look of determination on his face. Stiles stands in the doorway to the living room where they were just seated and watches him give out curt commands.

“You five,” he points to the new pack members, the non-human ones, “will follow Boyd and Isaac. You do exactly as they say and you will _not_ be reckless, is that understood?”

They nod, old shame pouring over their too young faces. _That’s interesting_ , Stiles smirks, his mind helplessly flashbacking to the good old times of his own douchey self and all the trouble he used to give Derek with his non-existent concept of pack hierarchy in that dumb teenage head of his.

“Danny, you’re in charge of the guys,” Derek says, and Stiles doesn’t have to use his special prison tricks (ha ha) to know who he means.

“Sure,” Danny gives him his usual chilled nod and waves at the humans, “Let’s go, people, you know where the guns are.”

“Scott,” Derek gives his most trusted pack member a firm stare. “Protect Stiles.”

“Why can’t he go with the rest?” One glance is enough for Stiles to notice it. Scott is quietly, in his own way, but still very dangerously livid. “He damn well knows how to use a gun.”

The look he shoots Stiles is another piece of the puzzle, but Stiles is too busy thinking in all different directions to focus on it.

“Don’t play dumb,” Derek barks out and turns around to charge forward, into the molasses of the night.

Isaac and Boyd divide their wolves and run separate ways, Lydia, Danny and other three humans leave a minute later, fully armed and resembling a group of Hunters. Stiles can’t help a small ironic smile.

And then there are just the two of them, and Scott leads him downstairs into the basement.

“Here,” he hands him a flashlight.

Six years ago, when Stiles was his normal self and this was his pack, the basement was just a big dump where they stored all sorts of useless but precious to the heart garbage they couldn’t find a place for. One would be surprised how much of such stuff you can’t part with when you rebuild a house practically from scratch. Some things you find in the debris. Derek had trouble saying goodbye even to pieces of the china cup one of his siblings used to drink from all the time.

Look at that basement now. Stiles directs the measly circle of light around a bunch of gym equipment, a set of weights starting with twenty-pounders and finishing with formidable giants, some punch balls and boxing bags, huge truck tires (what the hell for?) slumbering in the corner, a gun stand and, of course, two large metal cages. In the back, he can see a big shape which, Stiles assumes, is a supply of food and clean water. This would be a smart thing to do, considering the basement is obviously bullet- and claw-proof and can last a siege.

Six years ago, such a safe place was just a dream everyone felt uncomfortable talking about because the house was still a wreck, and so was their pack discipline. Evidently, the teenage days of the new Hales are over and it’s full-on adulthood now.

 _Go figure_ , Stiles scoffs as he wonders, with a slight pinch of uncalled for jealousy, if they could have done more or less with him still around. Probably more. Much more, in fact.

“You can sit here,” Scott waves at a large and rather aged couch huddling with four mismatched armchairs and five ottomans. Another pack nook.

 _Wonder if they saved me a spot_.

He sinks into the soft flesh of the couch, which earns a strange half-smirk from Scott.

“What, you called dibs on this spot or something?”

“No,” Scott shakes his head, and the smirk goes sour. “Derek never lets anyone sit there, is all.”

They stay silent for a whole minute after that. It’s not one of those friend silences the two used to share all the time, not by a mile. In it, Stiles struggles with a painful thought if this is the sound of them mourning their deceased bond, if this is all they are going to have from now on. Derek may be the forgiving kind, but Scott clearly has a whole boneyard to pick.

“The wiring got jacked up during the last storm,” Scott suddenly says, and the challenge and the anger is back. “We’ve been trying to figure it out, but it’s been a no-go so far. Hope the flashlight’s okay for now.”

“It’s fine.” Stiles takes his time to lie down and make himself comfortable so as not to hurt his wounds. It has become a habit lately to always watch his position. “Might as well get some shuteye while they’re gone.”

But he cannot so much as relax, let alone nap. The murderous vibes Scott is giving him are so damn obvious. Eventually Stiles gives up and sits up straight again, turns on the flashlight. Scott is sitting on the floor next to the couch, face down, all his figure exuding obstinate, child-like defiance.

 “What?” Stiles sighs.

Scott opens his mouth but doesn’t say anything for a second, as if he were unsure of actually delivering those words. Stiles can feel very deep fear emanating from his body, and he already knows he will be so sorry afterwards.

“I spoke with my mom about your wound,” Scott finally says. “She noticed something odd about the trajectory of the bullet and contacted your dad. They figured it out, Stiles.”

He has nothing to say to that. So he sits quietly and wonders who else is in the loop. Probably Isaac. Boyd. Danny. Not Derek, that’s for sure.

“But come on, man, it’s just so _bizarre_.” Scott’s face cringes in complete incomprehension.

“Who else knows?” Stiles asks calmly, looking straight into his eyes. Giving him the old stare-down.

“Isaac, Boyd and Danny.” _Of course_. “They’d known about your gun, I’d told them.”

“And what was their theory? Apart from me being off my rocker, let’s cross that out for a minute.”

Scott doesn’t even seem to notice how much he is giving away right now, thank God for pack instincts.

“Danny thinks it was the quickest way to send out the signal to the whole pack. That you needed physical pain to alarm us all. But no one really knows how you managed to pull that voodoo thing off, Derek refuses to speak about it and the rest don’t know much about Second’s powers.”

Stiles nods. He knew this was not going to stay under the rug for long, what with Scott having seen his gun and all. But he had no idea his dad was in it, too. What must he be thinking about him now? Poor old crazy Stiles, shooting himself in the arm for God knows what reasons. No wonder he has been getting creeped out sklents from him lately.

“When are you planning on telling Derek?”

Scott shudders, as if recovering from a nightmare, and only then seems to understand how much he has said already. That makes him really mad.

He jumps to his feet and growls, exasperated.

“What is your game here, Stiles? Who are those people you dragged here with you? You can’t keep us in the dark, our lives are at stake here! The lives of the people in our town – in _your_ town too, in case you forgot!”

“No one will be hurt, Scott.”

 _No one but me_ , he adds.

Scott starts pacing around the basement in frantic steps, claws emerging and drawing back, growls getting dangerously impatient.

“Do you realize how crazy you look right now to us?” he half-roars to Stiles from some dark corner. “A pack defector doing fuck knows what in Europe for years returns home, _shoots_ himself in the _goddamned arm_ to earn his old pack’s compassion, gets a _bomb_ explode right into his _fucking face_ – and then some werewolves appear in our woods! I mean, what the actual _fuck_ , Stiles?”

“It could be Anna’s wolves trying to chase me out of town,” Stiles shrugs.

He learned to lie to supernatural beings years ago. Confusing Scott is cake walk.

“ But-” Scott draws in a loud, angry breath. “Why didn’t you tell Derek about the bullet?”

“He would not have understood,” Stiles says calmly. “Just as you don’t now. I did it because I knew the pack would react faster than the police, and I was afraid for Miranda’s – my employee’s – life. And mine, too. I didn’t come back home to die, Scott. I want to have a life here, with or without you guys. I’m sorry that I forced you all to feel something you didn’t want to, that was a poor call, but I was panicking. Doing that seemed like the only way to go at the time.”

The last part was mostly true. He can feel Scott going still for several seconds, his emotions still a raging mess.

“But how did you _know_ that would work?” Scott asks finally, his voice dropping almost to a religious whisper.

 “You mingle with the supernatural crowd, you pick up a thing or two.”

“You mean it wasn’t Second’s power?”

“Only partially. I upgraded it some.”

He patiently waits for it to hit home, knowing there would be no way to avoid this conversation.

“Does that. . . I mean. . . Does that make you a- a _witch_?”

“No,” Stiles chuckles humbly. Very plausibly, too.

Silence. Then Scott says this.

“What do you _want_ from us, Stiles?”

“Nothing. I just want peace.”

“Don’t you want back in the pack?”

“I don’t know.” And this part is true. “I still care a lot about all of you, but years have passed, and I can’t undo what I did, Scott. Besides, Derek has his own life now, a larger pack, a daughter, that Anna person-”

“Yeah, and he’s miserable as hell,” Scott interrupts, stepping inside the circle of light. His face worn out and pitiful. Eyes like open wounds.

 _God, I’m such a shithead_ , Stiles thinks, but the thought doesn’t travel all that deep inside him. These days, he wonders, very few things do.

“I joined this pack because of you, Stiles.” His eyes begin glaring, but there is no more anger in them. Just hurt. “I believed in you and Derek, that you could make something great out of our loser alliance, I gave up my ambitions of starting my own pack – all because you and Derek seemed so solid, like, I don’t know, like the whole world could go to shit and you’d still have each other’s backs. And when you left-”

“I know,” he gulps audibly, shame oozing in. “I know, and I’m sorry.”

“But you have to understand one thing,” Scott continues, even closer now. Eyes yellow. “You don’t have much choice here. Your roots run too deep with ours, you can’t live separately just as we can’t either. It’s either you rejoin the pack and be our Second again or you leave Beacon Hills and _never_ return. None of us can bear anything else.”

Stiles doesn’t notice when his chin drops to his chest, eyes beginning to sting uncomfortably. He rubs them. It doesn’t help much.

“I know, Scott. I _know_ , and I can’t help it.”

Voice shaking uncontrollably.

Scott is sitting next to him now, offering his warmth and his silent support just like always. Stiles falls into the embrace and tries to get a hold of his breathing. Scott tells him to breathe with him, and he does. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale.

 _There, there_.

When the pack returns three hours later, faces beaten up and lost, Derek announces that they didn’t manage to catch whoever was lurking in the woods but got a scent of three werewolves who do not belong to Anna’s pack (to their knowledge, that is). They call Allison, waking her up, and order her to pack her and Talia’s things and get the hell home; Derek sends Isaac and Danny to give her protection on the road.

Everyone feels exhausted by that time, and the idea to catch some sleep is welcomed with open arms.

 

Derek manages to clench his fingers around his arm just in time, as Stiles is already going down the front steps, hoping to be left alone. They stop awkwardly in the middle, not quite sure where they both belong. The pack inside the house has gone quiet, listening in, and Derek feels stupid and giddy and like a child.

“You should stay with us tonight.”

It takes a lot to say those words, and Stiles can feel his inner struggle. He drops his gaze and barely makes out his shoes in the dark. It’s so damn dark. No light but that coming from inside the house.

“It’s. . . inappropriate, Derek.”

Quiet, sheepish almost. How did that Scott conversation turn him into this spineless, hopeful little boy?

“No,” Derek presses, “what’s inappropriate is you going home all alone. Who knows what those sickos are up to now, and you always end up getting in trouble these days.”

“Derek-”

“No, you’re _staying_. Period.”

It’s a very uncomfortable pile they form afterwards. By far the worst. No one can really fall asleep, muscles tense and trembling with unlived motion, brains going into overdrive with unexperienced feelings. However after two hours most of them do give in, and when Derek finds Stiles sitting on the window sill of the common bedroom at 5 am, he is the only one who sees it.

Stiles’ eyes are glowing red.

 _Red_.

The world outside is about to undergo its daily transformation from black to barely grey to alive again. Just like always. The forest animals yawning and stretching outside their abodes, the birds chirruping sleepily in the trees.

Just like always.

 Except Derek thinks he has never seen anything so un-just-like-always in his entire life. The contrast is so great that a part of him has an inexplicable desire to run outside and scare all those peaceful birds and animals away, then grab the very fabric of the upcoming dawn and tear it to smithereens – but even then it would not be enough.

Stiles’ eyes are glowing red, as in Alpha _red_ , and there are so many thoughts in his head right now. Instead of voicing any of them, he just lets his body move itself a little closer, drawn by the sadness and regret he can read in those eyes.

One small step. And another. The profile is melancholic, something from a long-lost, long-shattered dream one of them used to have. A good one with some nasty bits.

Derek finally touches.

Stiles turns his head slowly, takes in the hand on his shoulder, his gaze creeping gradually up. Eyes still red and morose.

“I’ll just spoil everything for everyone again, Derek. Please.”

Derek squeezes that shoulder gently. His tongue feels bitter and dead inside his mouth.


	5. Chapter 5

“Whoa, watch out!”

Stiles glances down at his hand, the one which is holding out the plastic cup. He’s not surprised to see it shaking.

“A little too young to be having that, eh?” the customer, a sixty-ish woman chirrups as she swiftly takes the cup and shoves him a five-dollar note instead. “Or are you just having a bad day?”

Stiles gives her an abashed smile, and that’s when the door of his coffee shop opens and, naturally, Derek strolls in, eyes wary, his usual constipated expression from the old days back. Hands deep inside his police uniform pants.

Stiles doesn’t need a crystal ball to know they are also shaking like a bitch right now.

“Sheriff!” the old-ish lady beams. “You look stressed. Have some coffee, it’s amazing!”

“Ahem. Thanks, Mrs. Oberdine.”

If Stiles didn’t feel the exact same degree of mortification, he’d be gloating the shit out of Derek’s face now.

Derek throws a quick glance at Stiles, then at Boyd and Isaac, who are half-assing the laid-back look from a faraway table – the pack’s table, since they have been taking turns occupying it lately – and chewing on pie like it’s no big deal their Alpha is here again.

When the nosy lady joins her crowd, Derek, the definition of uncomfortable, comes up to the counter and bends over it to quietly ask, “You okay?”

And if the constipated walk wasn’t clue enough for the locals who are watching the interaction with wink-wink-nudge-nudge grins, the whisper-plus-bending combo kills even the smidgeon of doubt any of them might have been harboring.

“You know, Sheriff,” Stiles deadpans, trying to behave after catching Isaac’s _Come on!_ eye roll, “this doesn’t look extra fishy at all. No one in town will dare wag their tongues about this later today, I’m sure.”

But his scent says otherwise, he knows it, mostly from the _Shut your lying mouth, Stilinski_ eyebrow arches from the pack table. Isaac whispers something to Boyd, which makes both of them snicker like a couple of siblings who have busted their parents doing something extra cheesy with embarrassment on top. Which they basically have.

Oh to hell with them.

 “Let’s just go,” Derek growls exasperatedly, and the look he sends his betas makes their shit-eating grins magically disappear.

Miranda is not here yet, but she’ll come back from the bakery any minute now. Stiles leaves a note on the counter, and since no one will dare take anything with the sheriff around, not very surreptitiously abandons his post, ushers Derek down the hall and into his so-called office.

As soon as the door makes the _click_ and the lock makes the _clack_ in his hands, he can feel Derek make a voracious lunge forward, and okay, the pressure and the heat are all over his back now. Everything about this is familiar, except for maybe his mind screaming bloody murder inside his head that they shouldn’t be doing this, and the whole pack knows, as well as the whole town, and this is so very inappropriate.

And yet, when Derek turns him around and hesitates just for a moment, his face hovering over Stiles’ neck, Stiles gives in and tilts his head a little for better access.

Derek presses his nose to his bare skin. Inhales. Again. And again, as if two times is by far not enough.

The first time it happened Stiles couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands, but now, twelve days of daily whatever-this-is later, they have their little routine all worked out.

Hugging, snuggling, pressing, smelling, scent-marking, even a little licking is okay. (The latter still being twilight zone though.)

Groping, kissing, sucking of any kind is not okay.

Talking about it before or after – NOT OKAY.

Easy as pie.

Stiles is not sure what to think of this, and Derek doesn’t make the job any easier by expertly dodging the subject, even though for the past twelve days he has been the one zealously showing up every damn afternoon.

The official reason for the first visit and, er, the stuff ensuing was Stiles being in pain and Derek, who just happened to be around on some police business, picking up on it and coming to the rescue with his werewolf powers. The next day, however, Derek didn’t even care to come up with a good reason to be in that part of town, and it didn’t occur to Stiles to ask. And so it seemed to have become just a thing they did: Derek would show up, Stiles would lead him to his office, and then the instincts would take over. 

It started happening right after that night in the Hale house, and people have been talking. What worries Stiles the most though is not the rumors; it’s the pack.

Derek might be too overwhelmed to be thinking clearly, but really, how can an alpha not notice the confusion their actions bring to their pack?

All jokes aside, the betas are obviously perplexed, not knowing where they stand now, especially the new ones.

And yet…

Stiles knows Derek will not stop coming. He also knows he has no power to break it off himself. These five meager minutes they share, when their bodies are one and their minds turn into one vulnerable lump of bare feeling – these five minutes seem like the only real thing in Stiles’ life. Something he has not had for six straight years. He cannot, will not let that go, no matter how selfish, irresponsible or manipulative that is.

When their time is up, Derek swiftly takes care of Stiles’ wounds. They are healing so fast because the whole pack has been chipping in, not to mention the constant attention of the Alpha. Besides, human standards of healing cannot really be applied to Stiles anymore.

“Looks good,” Derek croaks out after he meticulously inspects Stiles’ shoulder wound. Then he practically puts his face in front of Stiles’ and stares, which makes him feel exactly like in the old days but somehow even more harassed. The strong sense of arousal emanating from the Alpha does not help one bit.

“Your eyebrows are almost back to normal.”

Voice low, a slight tremble of a growl at the bottom of the sound. Stiles clears his throat and moves away, knowing all too well that they both pick up on how the comment makes him feel.

“Yeah, well. The customers must be wondering where I’ve gone off to.”

Derek snorts, teeth between his lips glistening teasingly for a split second.

“They all think the same thing. Even the pack, who should know better.”

“Well, they’re not completely off base, all things considered,” Stiles says in the same sarcastic tone, and _of course_ his brain takes its sweet time catching up on the meaning of these words.

 _Damn his stupid mouth_.

“Ugh.”

That’s it. This is all he says, goggling up at Derek all deer-in-the-headlightsy, mouth slightly ajar, and oh how fucking ridiculous he must seem now. This must be his personal Throwback Thursday from Hell because he feels just as stupid right now as he did being a teen with a fugitive werewolf camping out in his bedroom.

Derek stares back. It might actually last for a second or two, but for Stiles it seems like two whole eternities filled with all the ways he made a fool of himself throughout their decade-long, turbulent acquaintance.

“Why did your eyes glow red back then?” Derek finally asks the long-brewing question, body slightly trembling with exertion. Stiles can feel it even though they are not touching, which somehow makes this whole scene – them together in this confined space - even more illicit.

He swallows, trying to find his voice inside his throat, but doesn’t break the stare.

“I. . . Have no idea? No, seriously,” he goes on with more confidence upon meeting Derek’s chary squint. “They just started doing this, I don’t know, a while back. When I was. You know.”

Derek keeps staring, and the cogs are obviously turning in his head, but his face is blank and shut-down, just as his emotions are to Stiles right now. This is new. And _very_ disconcerting.

Since the time Stiles returned, Derek’s emotional palette has been almost obscenely open to him, like a book lying on the bed stand, always eager to be leafed through, yearning to be touched. And Stiles did, on so many occasions. He read Derek from a distance, slightly amused at being followed just like in the old days, he could feel him keeping vigil outside his bedroom window late at night.

Soon this became a part of his routine. Six a.m.: wake up, check email and Facebook, see how Derek is doing, start his day. Eleven p.m.: slide into bed, set up the alarm, check up on Derek, follow Derek’s emotional pattern for a while, fall asleep with a bittersweet heartache in his chest.

But there is absolutely nothing emanating from Derek now, not even his wolf emotions that couldn’t care less than to be obscure. The inside of Derek seems wiped out clean, and Stiles has little else left than to panic inwardly.

Throwback Thursday from Hell indeed.

The next moment Derek pushes past him, fiddles with the lock impatiently (O _f course they would think we’re doing it in here_ , Stiles thinks inappropriately, _why the fuck do I keep locking it?_ ). It’s a bad lock, an old-timer Stiles had inherited from the previous owner, the one who had that awful coffee shop called Coffee. (God almighty, what a stupid-ass name!) And when Derek’s patience runs out, he doesn’t think twice before ripping the door open with a disgruntled roar.

“Der-” Stiles starts to say, but it’s too late.

Everyone inside rubbernecks the Sheriff stiff-walking out and slamming the door shut like there’s no tomorrow. Then the heads turn back to Stiles, who is doing a shit job keeping a straight face.

“It’s okay, folks,” he says, his lip corners twitching, “just a little lock incident. Was pretty old, is all.”

 

“What are you, nuts?” Scott hisses anxiously into his phone.

He then steals a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one has entered the bathroom after him. Stupid human habit, of course he knows no one is around. All the other doctors are busy trotting off on urgent doctor business and the patients – well, the ones they have here don’t really use human bathrooms. Their owners might, but then again, his wolf is always on watch duty.

“You can’t send me such stuff while I’m at work!” he spits into the phone again, looking at his ghost-like reflection in the mirror. Wow, he does look scared shitless. “Fess up, you photoshopped them.”

“Dude,” Danny’s calm voice drawls, driving a thick thorn of blame right into Scott’s chest.

“Sorry,” he sighs, “I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s just- Is this really him?”

“Name’s his all right. So is the face.”

“But the eyes! How is this possible, Danny? Are you absolutely, one hundred percent positive this is for real?”

Danny’s silence is eloquent enough.

“Sorry. Scratch that.” Scott rubs his forehead. Feels like his head is starting to swell up with all this mysterious shitstorm coming down on them day after day. “But how? He’s not Alpha. Derek would have felt something. Or- Do you think it’s some kind of magic trick? He said something about learning magic in Europe the night we were all at the house.”

“Yeah, he was registered as a witch in the file,” Danny, who has a talent of always sounding like he doesn’t give two shits about anything, delivers in his usual chilled tone. “So it might have been a spell gone wrong. Or maybe someone cursed him.”

“Wait, wh- what file? You got a file on him too?”

“You bet I did. And judging from this baby here, Stiles did _not_ have a field day in Europe.”

“Well arrest me for not feeling sorry for the fucker.”

Scott takes the phone away from his ear and studies the pictures again. The familiar juvenile face, unruly hair, stupid long neck – it’s the same Stiles he remembers from six years ago. For the most part, at least. Surreptitiously, slowly, somewhere at the bottom of a hole where damp leaves decay and bones of small animals are scattered bare – this is how he imagines his old friend’s soul now, – the new Stiles was already emerging.  The ticking time bomb from next door. Arrogant, watchful, self-confident. Powerful.

“But wait a second,” Scott frowns, remembering something. “How did they manage to take the picture with his supposedly Alpha eyes open? It’s impossible. So it must be fake.”

“Scott, this is the European Supernatural Interpol. You don’t think they have the technology to do that?”

“Yeah, you're probably right. Fuck, we have to tell Derek.”

Danny hesitates. Scott can hear his heartbeat even over the line, and it’s disturbing. What kind of dirt did the guy dig from that secret European supe database of his?

“I actually don’t think it’s a good idea. That’s why I called.”

Scott moans into his cupped hand, “Dude, why me? Of all the people in the pack. Seriously, you know I _hate_ keeping things from Derek!”

“Yes, but you are also the closest to him and know him better than any of us.”

Scott lets out a deep sigh and glances in the mirror again. He still looks like a ghost in it.

 “I hate you so much right now, Danny.”

“I know. Meet me at the bar, I’ll show you the file.”

Thirty minutes and two fingers of whiskey later, they come up with something shaping up to be a plan.

“Okay, walk me through this again,” Scott sighs. In such moments, he regrets that he can’t get drunk anymore. He cannot even imagine what getting to work drunk feels like, and boy, what fun that must be. Besides, breaking the news to Derek would be half as easy hammered. Looks like being a human surely has its perks.

Danny, who is sitting opposite him at the table farthest from the stand in their favorite bar, takes in the artificially darkened room with a cautious stare and only then talks.

“We tell him about the database I found, but we’ll say the Europeans have some fancy-ass protection system and the only thing I managed to grab is his mug shots, but I didn’t copy the file – they spotted the breach and quickly shut me off. I then sent you the pictures to get a second pair of eyes for identification, and I went over the Alpha solely because I didn’t want to bother him with nonsense if it proved to be such.”

“Aha?” Scott slurps the remaining whiskey from his glass, not feeling convinced at all.

Danny is a human, and he still doesn’t understand how profoundly lying in the were world fails.

“So then,” Danny goes on, fiddling with the straw in his tall glass, “we ask him about the eyes and suggest confronting Stiles about it. The guy will talk if Derek presses enough, I’m sure. We won’t have to keep the file secret for long afterwards. Easy-peasy. Well?”

Scott honestly shrugs. “I don’t know. . . What if we just give Derek the whole file and let him decide?”

“Scott,” Danny gives him a tired eye roll, “I understand that as Chief Beta it’s your instinct to be truthful with your Alpha. But don’t forget that it’s also your job to protect his wellbeing.”

“Yeah, but maybe-”

“What if Stiles chickens out and takes off?” Danny is ruthless. “We can’t risk Derek going crazy over the loss again. No. I don’t know about you, but I’m not prepared to go through the same hell one more time. Besides, if Derek shows signs of instability or weakness, we can kiss Talia goodbye. Anna will never let her visit our pack anymore, not with everything happening lately. And she will have the law on her side.”

“I know all that, Danny, _Jesus_.” It’s bitter to hear the same gloomy thoughts that have been bombarding Scott ever since Danny showed him the file. It’s bitter and scary. “But don’t you think we can at least enlighten him about the ex-wife situation? It shouldn’t be too much of a shock, with Derek having Talia on the side and all.”

Danny contemplates this for a while with a heavy stare. Then shakes his head.

“It’s too personal, we’re out of our depth here. Besides, that ruins our whole story. If we know about the ex-wife, it means we have his file and know the rest.”

 “I don’t know,” Scott kicks back in his seat, confused. “I still don’t feel comfortable keeping secrets from Derek.”

“But you didn’t tell him about Stiles’ gun and the truth about his wound, did you?” Danny whispers almost inaudibly, just in case someone from the pack is outside tuning in. It’s almost funny how Stiles’ arrival and the subsequent swarm of secrets have turned all of them so paranoid.

“Yes, and I’m plenty sure Derek knows something because he keeps giving me these weird sklents. Let’s just tell him, Danny, I can’t keep this going for long. We’ll be gentle breaking it to him, he’ll understand. Derek's older now, and plus there’s little Talia to take care of. He won’t just bail this time. He can’t.”

But Danny digs his heels in, and in the end Scott has to surrender. It’s much less work to just agree with Danny, the voice of hard cold logic in their group. They send the mug shots to the Alpha and wait in an uncomfortable silence for the call.

 

 

“Who did you tell?”

To Scott, Derek has always seemed scary, but there is a specific brand of awe he experiences for Derek in sheriff uniform, something perhaps having its roots in childhood when Stiles’ dad had occupied the position and served as the voice of reason to them both. Now, with Derek being both his Alpha and the Sheriff, the mix is shy of explosive.

They are in the basement, sitting on the pack couch, and Derek’s glowing eyes promise nothing great. Not with Derek picking them both up straight from work and driving them here in eerie silence without informing the rest of the pack. Scott shifts uncomfortably in his spot, and so does Danny. They must look like a couple of third-graders who are made to wait in the principal’s office for their parents to show up and listen to all the crap their offspring have been up to. Which makes Derek seem even more like Sheriff Stilinski now.

“Nobody. I just shared them with Scott, and that’s it, I swear,” Danny states in his best mature voice. The one which says he means business. “You can check my phone if you want.”

Derek ignores the last phrase.

“And are you sure the other side can’t track you down?”

“The European supes? Pretty sure they won’t even care enough to try. All I did was steal a couple of mug shots of some ex-con with questionable witch skills, Derek, come on.”

Derek is blissfully oblivious, but everyone in the pack knows all the telltale signs. The minute twitching of his right eyebrow, the involuntary sniffing motion his nose makes, as if testing the waters for pitfalls. Derek so obviously knows something, the sneaky bastard. Hell, he might have even asked a foreign friend or two for a solid, which means he had seen the file long before Danny poked his nose in there. And why is it just occurring to Scott now?

“All right, guess we’re past the point of me giving you a lecture on international supe etiquette,” is what Derek finally settles on, and Scott doesn’t want to be too hopeful, but it looks like he can see the light. They are almost out of the woods now. “Doesn’t mean you’re getting away with it, because we are having this conversation with the whole pack later.”

“O-Okay?” Danny gives him a half-assed, hopeful grin.

“But Danny, I’m warning you. Don’t go snooping in there again, it’s dangerous. The supes in Europe already had a tight, strictly organized community when this land was still nothing but a goddamned armpit. They are the real deal, and we’d be complete imbeciles to intrude on their territory. Tell me you understand.”

“I understand,” Danny nods obediently, face slipping into serious mode again. “I won’t do that again.”

Derek’s eyes shift to Scott, who can’t help cringing. This situation doesn’t just remind him of his elementary school getting-in-trouble days, it feels exactly the same, too.

“Scott.” Ha, now he sounds just like the principal. “Why did Danny send the pictures just to you?”

The version he and Danny came up with seems so ridiculous and so full of holes now that he just can’t sell it to Derek. That would be disrespectful. So he says this.

“I guess he figured I knew why Stiles’ eyes look like yours in them. He and I were still tight around the time he became Second, I guess he thought Stiles had told me more than the rest of the pack.”

“He didn’t become Second.”

Derek’s carefully measured remark catches them both off guard.

“What?” And then Scott remembers. “Oh yeah, that’s right. I forgot he didn’t go through that stupid ritual. But does it really matter?”

Derek kicks back on the couch, eyes dark, scent more than worried.

“I don’t know. It might.”

“You mean to say,” Scott winces from an idea that came to him just now, “he could become someone else’s Alpha because he was not officially our Second at the time?”

Derek just shakes his head woefully, and for the first time in his life Scott manages to discern a helpless little boy hiding behind those strong formidable features of his Alpha. The sight makes his blood run cold.

“I don’t know how this works. It’s magic and supe tradition mashed together. It’s very complicated.”

 _And I don’t have anyone to ask for advice now_ , Scott reads in the eyes of that scared boy being eaten away by guilt and sorrow.

“But that’s bullshit! He _was_ our Second – and _is_! Derek, you can’t deny that!” Scott feels like all the air in the world is not enough for him right now. Something deep inside him starts shaking violently with indignation, and his voice catches up on the vibration. “Derek, listen. Remember how he sent us all the call on the day of the shooting?”

“Might have been his witch powers kicking in.”

“I don’t believe that!”

Derek shoots him a deadly glare and shoves his phone with the pictures on the screen into his face, “Do you believe _this_?”

The silence that ensues is almost as eerie as that on the day Derek announced to the pack that Stiles had left and would probably not be coming back. The thought makes a lump in Scott’s throat, the one he hasn’t been aware of until now, double in size.

He hates it. He hates all of it: the secrets, the unknown territory they are being forced to step on, and most of all – Stiles. He wants to hate the guy so damn much, hate him with this seething, biblical hate, something that grows out of your body and becomes a being of its own, heartless, ruthless.

Instead, what comes out of his heart – his loyal werewolf heart – is a deadly mix of unquestionable loyalty, frustration and, would you look at that, love.

Derek picks up on that, and the strict, furrow-in-the-brow stare does a shit job hiding what he really feels, which is exactly the same.

The Alpha clears his throat uncomfortably and gets up, giving the signal.

“Don’t confront him about this. I have an Alpha friend in Canada who, I think, told me once about a similar situation that happened in her pack long ago. I’ll call her tonight.”

 

There is no Alpha friend in Canada, nor is there an answer – a sane one, that is. Which is why Derek felt so compelled to send the mug shots and is now downing shot after shot after shot in that little bar he used to like so much. Used to because now it just seems crammy and dirty and insufferably claustrophobic. There are five people, five beaten-down strangers scattered around the place who all smell pretty much of the same thing – tired despair. Only five, but it feels like getting trapped in an elevator with a horde.

The wolf smells him coming long before the human registers the memo, so when the door opens and there he comes, a bundle of street smells mixed with coffee and cinnamon trailing after him – when that happens, Derek feels almost surprised. The wolf growls distressfully at that.

_Be focused!_

“Hey.”

Nervous half-chuckle. Stiles hops onto the chair next to Derek, looking dead-tired and fidgety.

“Can I have what he’s having?”

So very nervous.

The bartender smirks and places an entire bottle of vodka in front of him.

“Whoa. Uhm, actually scratch that, buddy, I still like my liver. I’ll just have a whiskey on the rocks, thank you.”

Derek can’t help a little smirk.

The bartender, who was already here when a ballsy sixteen-year-old Derek tried to trick him with his fake ID, quirks an eyebrow.

“You always used to threaten that you'd drink all my beer when you turned twenty one, Stilinski, what’s up with that?”

“I also used to stuff my face with curly fries like there’s no tomorrow and binge-watch dorky vampire shows. Give me a break, Jeff.”

“Point taken,” Jeff the bartender pours him the whiskey and disappears. It’s not like he has many customers at two in the morning anyway.

A long silence drops after that, as if Jeff has treacherously herded away all the words in the world along with him. They drink, the wolf watches.

Finally – after what feels like a whole lifetime – something obscurely shifts in the wall of silence between them, and suddenly they both feel it is time.

“So you read the file.”

“No,” Derek keeps his eyes firmly on his hands holding the empty glass, hoping that somehow things would be less real if he did so. “This is all I have. What I sent you.”

“Danny?”

“Spot on.”

“You know he can’t have stolen just the mug shots, right? I mean, come on, it’s Danny.”

“I know.”

Stiles chews on that answer a little. Takes a sip of his whiskey. Cringes. Ah, he has always been such an unattractive drinker.

“So what, you’re not even a little bit curious?”

_Ha. Ha ha ha. What kind of question is that?_

“I just,” Derek harrumphs, not knowing what else to do with his body, “didn’t want to learn things about you through some file, is all.”

“Fair enough.”

They drink some. Keep silence some, mourning their long-lost trust, the ease they used to have around each other. This is disappointing, but not really. After all, six years is something real – something you can’t easily sweep under the rug.

Then, somehow, Derek misses the moment when he says yes to a night run in the forest, and only comes to when he is undressing near the tree he usually leaves all his stuff under and it’s really late, if the heavy, moist, fresh night air is anything to go by, and Stiles is there, staring at the moon, awkwardness oozing out of his very pores.

And they run, just like in the old days. The wolf frolics around the human, makes circle after circle, sniffs his open palms and growls softly, leaning into the familiar touch. The wolf forgets easily. He is incapable of holding a grudge when the beautiful moon calls from above and the shadows offer a welcoming embrace. It is impossible to remember.

And when Derek lets go fully and the wolf voraciously takes over, the inky colors of the night blur, and so do his memories. It is hardly a surprise when he resurfaces, seemingly hours later and the night growing old, and finds his very naked human form pressing the other body firmly to a centenarian larch-tree.

The kiss is obscenely hungry, and the aftermath of the wolf’s reign makes him want like no human can ever want. It is the wolf still who urges the claws out and digs them softly, but intentionally into the human’s denim-clad sides. Just a little, just to play. The human responds by biting him on the neck, hard, accusatory, and that is when something pushes him in the solar plexus.

A second later, he finds himself six feet away to see Stiles, who seems to have aged by a decade, sliding wearily down the tree trunk, hands shaking and the red slowly creeping in and chasing away the brown from the irises of his eyes.

Dumbfounded and barely managing to tame the agitated wolf, Derek stands there and stares at those shaking hands. The miserable, geriatric tremble. Short uneven nails. Some dirt and moth under them, little wrinkles around the tendons. The nails of some ten-year-old tyke who is too busy to care planning a new mischief. Carelessness and despair enmeshed.

Those terrible, terrific hands which smell like his fur.

And that horrible red again.  Just like in the pictures. Just like that night at the house. The red the flicker of which he first saw six years ago when Stiles killed their last common enemy, right before he vanished from their lives.

“Oh my God, Jesus fuck, are they doing it again?”

Stiles gasps and gasps, drowning in the wave of panic, and covers his face as if that will help. And he does look much, much older, with those shaky old-man-boyish hands and that broken voice. He looks like his father.

“I’m so sorry, Derek. Did it push you? I’m sorry.”

The wolf growls in warning, but Derek pays it no heed – he is already squatting near Stiles, who smells of so many confusing emotions right now, and gently takes his hands off his face.

Yes, the eyes are still red, but now that he can see them up close, he notices, not without relief, that the color is not stable. It shifts from Alpha red to orange to maroon and back to red again, playfully, like a child sticking its tongue out – _ha ha, fooled ya_!

 “Damn it!”

In a fit of blind anger, Stiles drives his open palm into the center of his forehead, and in this moment miraculously turns into that crazy, unstable, in-your-face kid ballsy enough to jump-start their lifelong ordeal by proclaiming, _You’re a dick, Derek, but luckily for you, I have the worst taste in men_.

Anger makes him weak and irrational, and that is the exact opposite of the level-headed, empty-hearted Stiles who walked into Derek’s office a few weeks ago and said all those awful things.

It is only for a moment, Derek knows it, that he is allowed to taste this salty droplet from the nostalgia ocean, but even this meager promise makes his heart go faster.

He sits on the ground next to Stiles, suddenly very much aware of his nudity, and takes the smells in. The wolf likes what it discerns: a strong mix of despair and shame, but dominating over it – the will to prevail, fight, siege, overcome.

 The fingers stop trembling – Stiles makes them stop. With a spark of pride emanating from the wolf, Derek realizes that this person needs no comforting – not really. All he really needs is to lighten his burden, and that Derek is prepared to do.

“Tell me everything.”

Stiles turns to him, both heartbeat and face fully calm now, which makes Derek’s thoughts jump back in time to that awfully moonless night six years ago. Again, he saw Stiles squeezing the last breath from their enemy’s lungs, and again, he listened for the heartbeat. Steady as a rock. The heartbeat of a born killer.

“I can’t control it coming and going.” Stiles waves his hand around his face which stills looks incredibly wrong with that floating red. “But you’ll be glad to know they’re not real. I don’t have a pack on the side, in case you’re wondering.”

“Of course not,” Derek half-barks, the wolf inside him growing tense.

“It’s the witch.”

Derek was hoping for this answer, but only now, after the supernatural shove he experienced a minute ago, do all the pieces of the puzzle get together for him.

“It’s competitive.”

“Witches are mavericks,” Stiles shrugs. “They don’t understand subordination and can only tolerate it when uniting against a common enemy.”

Derek nods, and everything suddenly becomes incredibly clear and simple in his mind.

“You left because it was beginning to take over and you couldn’t cope.”

Stiles’ answer is a tired but relieved smile – _you understand_.

“It was maddening.” Then, quieter, “Still is sometimes.”

“But why didn’t you feel you could confide in me? I would have tried to help you, we could have found someone to teach you.”

Stiles shakes his head a little too vigorously, and for a second there Derek catches a cold gleam of horror inside his eyes, which are now almost back to their original hazelnut.

“This power despised the fact that its carrier was Second to some werewolf, and you know how witches and werewolves are. Anyway, it wanted you gone from my life.”

Derek tries to imagine how it must feel – to always have a shadow passenger sitting in the back seat of your mind; someone whose indistinct but hateful muttering haunts you even in your sleep; someone who is not resourceful, strong and decent like his wolf – not until it’s tamed at least.

“Did it hate me so much that it made you think of killing me?”

Stiles only smiles and doesn’t answer for five, seven, ten seconds.

“It doesn't hate you. It hates the fact that you’re my Alpha.”

“’Hates’, meaning still does,” Derek points out with a bitter note. “You haven’t tamed it?”

The shrug Stiles regards this question with is distant but not cold.

“I thought I had. But with you so close now, it’s hard sometimes. You know, it’s not easy to find help for someone whose case is close to unprecedented in the supe history.”

“What?” Derek frowns. “No way, I’m sure there have been tons of pack members with witch powers.”

“But not a single Second. At least the supe historians I talked to in Europe knew of no such thing.”

Suddenly the cloudless mirth of relief wavers, cracks, shatters inside him, and the shards cut deep. And now many things start making sense to him: the sadness in Stiles’ eyes the morning after the pack meeting, why he avoided making amends as soon as he crossed the town line, his thorny attitude throughout all this time.

“So that’s why you’re having doubts about rejoining the pack,” Derek states in a small voice. “You’re afraid you’ll kill me.”

He feels small too – too small before the forces of fate seemingly at play here, looming high over their tiny heads.

 “Pretty much.”

Stiles’ shrug is noncommittal – he has clearly long made peace with this petrifying loss of control.

They fall silent, the stalemate all too clear to the both of them. Then Derek jerks up, a spark of an idea in his head.

“What does this power want? Have you asked it? I remember I had similar problems with my wolf, but all kids in my pack were taught to resolve them before going to a human school. I think-”

“It wants to be alone,” Stiles interrupts in a hollow voice, his eyes reflecting the tone. “Witches don’t understand caring, courage, safety, self-sacrifice – all the things important for werewolves. A witch’s greatest pride is independence.”

“But your other part wants all those things?” Derek tries his best not to let desperation sink into the tone. “You’re as much a werewolf as you are a witch, don’t forget that. If not physically then mentally – you are, and you know it. And you’ll never be happy if you just keep running from your home. From us.”

Stiles doesn’t look at him. The darkness surrounding them seems to be of much greater interest to him, as his now normal eyes squint at the mysterious shapes of trunks and bushes that stand guard and bear witness.

“That’s why you returned,” Derek presses, the wolf urging him on. “You can’t bear being without us just as we can’t without you. Like it or not, you’re Second of this pack.”

“Not officially,” Stiles reminds with a half-hearted smirk.

“We’ll make it official, but before that we’ll deal with whoever is targeting us.”

“Me.” Stiles holds the words that are clearly ready to be out for a couple of more seconds, doubt and fear in his very pose. Finally he says, “I have no idea who those werewolves in the woods were two weeks ago, but I know who’s after me, and it’s not Anna.”

The wolf in Derek falls eerily silent at that. Watchful. Focused on one thing only – the lips of the human, waiting for more sounds to come out of them.

“We used to work together,” Stiles, whose inner struggle is all too visible now, finally admits, and after this first phrase it becomes easier. “I mean, I used to do gigs for them. It’s complicated, Derek.”

 “I already know you’ve been in supe jail, you might as well tell me the rest. Did you kill someone?”

“No, no. It was… Mostly it was about money. The way they explained it to me, I was a valuable asset: someone from the werewolf world but not really tied by any of the werewolf laws. You see, the wolves in Europe all felt that I was a part of some pack, someone important, but none of their laws or limitations applied to me because officially I was not your Second, and European wolves don’t accept human betas in packs. That created a unique position for me, and gave me leverage.”

“Against them?” Derek swallows heavily, now beginning to understand.

Stiles averts his gaze, which is answer enough.

“I was well-received in both the witch and werewolf communities, but I chose the former. And that’s how I ended up gambling with the wolves and stealing a fuckton of money from them with my awesome witch powers.”

“What?”

Derek was ready to believe anything: espionage, prostitution, wet jobs – anything, really.

“Told you it was about the dough,” Stiles gives him a mirthless half-smile.

Derek nods. He has heard about the confrontational situation between wolves and witches in Europe, and it makes sense the latter would resort to all sorts of tricks to milk the former. Due to their complicated and much more ancient history, European witches suffered massive persecutions from humans for centuries while the wolves were in the shadows, slowly growing more and more influential. And also rich. At one point in the Middle Ages, a werewolf alliance was formed with a single agenda: help the humans eradicate the witches. They were very successful at this, too, and the witches did not forget.

But still. . .

“Your own kind, Stiles,” Derek can’t help it – the wolf demands he say it.

“Yes.” Stiles nods firmly. He smells of shame. “The situation there is very different from America though: a lot of the wolves there are actual assholes, murderers, criminals, and the supe Interpol doesn’t have the resourses to deal with all of them – the wolves sit in high places. It’s not like in here. American wolves kind of hate the witches and the witches kind of hate them back but as long as they don’t cross roads, it’s all good.”

“And so,” Derek finds his dry tongue in his mouth to sum up, “you decided to play Robin Hood and shake the evil moneybags. Is that why you ended up in jail?”

“No. The robinhooding bit was later, when the witches bailed me out.”

“So what were you in for?”

Stiles waves it off, “Stupid stuff. I unknowingly broke a dozen of their laws while learning magic.”

Derek rubs his forehead, only now realizing how tired his body is. He stands up and reaches out a hand to help Stiles, “Let’s go find my clothes. You’ll tell me the rest on the way.”

It’s a twenty-minute walk, and the talk accompanying it is long enough for Derek to feel mad, indignant, sorry, jealous and glad around three times in a row. A real emotional rollercoaster, and oh boy did Stiles take him for a ride.

But when they are already in the car heading to Mayor Stilinski’s house, what he mainly ends up with is relief. It’s after six when they pull up, and the houses around them are about to wake up and greet the new day.

“These witches you worked for,” Derek says with confidence he didn’t have an hour ago, “can be dealt with. You should have come forward with this a month ago.”

Stiles snorts, eyes wandering uncomfortably, “The prodigal douchebag seeking cover? I had no right commanding your wolves, Derek.”

“You do now.”

Stiles shakes his head, and this little shake, this tiny little gesture suddenly creates a whole chasm between them.

“First I have to redeem myself,” Stiles says, oblivious to what he has just done, “and that means dealing with the past head-on. It looks like they don’t really want to kill me, which is good. They want me back in the game, obviously, but I have no idea what they’re opting for with this whole gangster theater.”

Derek shrugs – it all seems pretty clear to him now.

“They want to provoke the pack. Make us reunite through our instinct to protect one of our own, and then trick us into swinging the first punch. I don’t know about European supe laws, but on US territory the party initiating the fight has much less protection than the defending party.”

“They want to kill everything that ties me to the wolves,” Stiles nods, realization kicking in. “And stay in the clear.”

“But that’s stupid. How do they expect to coerce you into cooperation after that? The witches can’t do that, right?”

“That’s the problem,” Stiles says absent-mindedly as they both instinctively turn their heads to the opening entrance door to see a tall, carnivorously smiling stranger stepping onto the porch to greet them. “They can.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for all your support, guys! It's only thanks to you that I managed to finish this chapter. Only one left to go!


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A huge thanks to [Khymeira](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Khymeira/pseuds/Khymeira) who proofread this chapter. And to all of you who nudged me to get back to this fic - it's only thanks to you that I finally did!  
> I hope you'll like the end of the story. It's become very precious to me, and even though I'm not in the Teen Wolf fandom anymore, I still love the characters. This is my tribute to them.

 

“But this is bullshit! They can’t do this!”

Scott, red-faced and practically talking spit, drives his fist helplessly into the wall of their meeting room, effectively leaving a fist-shaped indentation in it. Hardly anyone is shocked, with the morning they’re having and all.

“They can and they will, Scott.”

 Stiles, who is sitting deflated and alone in the farthest armchair, doesn’t raise his head when he says it. The other pack members turn to him, and when it is clear he won’t elaborate, turn instinctively back to Derek. He is slouching in his Alpha spot, alone, and their stares burn.

“All right,” Allison hops up and presses on Scott’s shoulders to make him sit down. “Derek, tell us everything, from the very beginning.”

It’s 8 a.m. now, and it’s strange to see his pack in work clothes – usually they dress down for their meetings and in most cases bring beer. But then again, it has been a long time since they were called in this early.

Less than two hours ago they were at the table in the kitchen with Mayor Stilinski and the stranger who was here to ruin their lives. The thought of that wide, sate grin makes Derek suffocate with wrath.

“Apparently there’s a contract signed by Stiles,” he barely manages to make his lips move. Everyone is staring at him, their eyes like those of little children begging their father to change the nighttime story, to imagine a different ending this time. “And the contract,” he goes on, practically roping his voice out, “binds him to join this group of witches whenever they claim their right. He can’t break it.”

“Why the hell not?” Scott, whom Derek has never seen so livid, grates his words out and is about to spring up from his place again, but Allison does her thing again.

“But wait a second,” Lydia steps in, “is this contract even valid? As far as I remember, a pack member can’t sign any documents without the consent of their Alpha. Or is it different for Seconds?”

“But Stiles isn’t officially Second, Derek said so himself,” Danny chimes in, leaning forward.

“Yes,” Derek heaves a deep sigh, a slight pinch of guilt touching his heavy heart. “Stiles is listed as a beta in the contract. The witches were obliged by law to contact me about it, but it was the time I was. . . unavailable. One of you must have taken the call.”

They all fall silent, eyebrows furrowed in concentration, even the ones who joined after that incident, and for a second there Derek wants nothing else but to scoff at their funny faces. Instead, he tries to remember who might have been in charge over the time of his madness.

His void lasted three or so months, Scott later told him, and the pack was on the verge of a breakdown again. Derek himself could only remember fragments; whenever he tried to make himself delve into the memories, he could only glimpse small silvers of memory:

Wet grass.  Blinking at the faraway firefly lights of human settlements, cold seeping deep into his bones. Nightmares. Howling, lamenting to the moon for answers. Nothing.

Later he would find out that his wolf during that time had met another wolf, and the other wolf, knowing his reasons, still decided to mate. And then Talia appeared.

Derek could never feel fully guilty for what happened then – his wolf needed to grieve, and his pack was, thankfully, strong enough to cope. Yes, it was dangerous to leave them unprotected for three months, but the wolf takes what it needs, no more and no less. Three months was an essential time to survive, not only for him but in the long run – for the Hale pack as well. And they all did.

“I remember a strange call,” Lydia pipes up. “This bitchy guy with an accent. He was adamant about talking to Derek specifically, and I spent around fifteen minutes coming up with excuses, one lamer than another. Finally he lost his temper and hung up.”

“And that gave Stiles the right to sign the contract,” Derek finishes reluctantly.

All he wants now is to sleep, preferably pressing his face into the space between Stiles’ shoulder blades. Forget the imminent shitstorm, turn a blind eye, shut down, if only for one more day. But all they have fourteen more hours.

“But he’s not beta,” Scott puffs out, “he’s our Second! So the contract is _wrong_ – there’s no such person as Stiles the Beta, he doesn’t exist!”

Derek closes his eyes – all this hectic yelling is making his head hurt. As soon as the pack’s worried faces disappear, another one surfaces: the grinning face of the stranger who came to take his life away from him.

 _Oh, but I remember you stating otherwise_ , the stranger said with a thick German accent. _In fact, I remember it so clearly because just now I have played the audio of that conversation to Stiles’ father here_.

Mayor Stilinski, tense and haggard over his half-empty cup of coffee, nodded and looked at Derek _. I’m sorry_ , his eyes said, and Derek felt hot sticky warmth spreading through his memory.

The bar, and that strange guy who had worked so hard to smell just right. The one who was asking all those stupid fucking questions about Stiles, and made sure that Derek would say the actual words. What _did_ he say then?

_Stiles is not mine._

_He doesn’t mean anything to me._

_Stiles has no place in my group or in my life_.

No Alpha in his right mind would dare say anything like that about their Second. About a beta – maybe, if the Alpha was angry or upset.  But a Second could kill for words like that; or worse – leave.

“They have evidence of me confirming that he’s not my Second.”

“But that-” Scott begins to object, then looks around helplessly. The others avoid eye contact. “That doesn’t matter. Fuck. You must have been upset, or angry. Couples fight, what else is new?”

“Human couples – yes. But when an Alpha says something like I did. . .”

Scott inhales sharply to unleash a new verbal attack, but chokes back his words.

“Well,” he finally manages in a much less confident voice, “that makes sense – Stiles wasn’t back in the pack yet when you said it.”

Derek doesn’t dare look in Stiles’ direction. “That doesn’t matter. He wasn’t officially my Second and he still isn’t as far as law is concerned. On paper, he is a beta, despite being my mate.”

“But-” Scott spins around, his eyes darting from Stiles to Derek and back before he explodes in a fluster. “Guys! What’s wrong with you?! Stiles, for fuck’s sake, just don’t do it! Terminate the contract, say you’re not interested anymore! And if they want to fight, we’ll kick their asses!”

Stiles finally looks up, and Derek shudders to the very core. This can’t be the same person who he shared a night run with only five hours ago. This face cannot belong to the Stiles who so efficiently and promptly stifled his own panic attack in the woods.

“If the pack disrespects a contract in force, said pack’s other agreements will be annulled, and the pack will lose the right to make new alliances as well as be protected by the supe jurisdiction until further consideration. That means we lose Talia. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

It feels as if someone has just died – so silent they all fall, and even their hearts have seemingly ceased to beat – the usual hotel lobby music to any werewolf’s ear.

 _Go on_ , Derek urges, glaring at the wax replica of his Stiles, _finish them off_.

“Moreover,” Stiles continues, “this territory will be under constant attack from other packs and the supe police will do jack shit about it. We’ll be on our own, with no allies. How long do you think we’ll hold?”

Danny, who has been awfully quiet this morning (possibly because he wasn’t fully awake), suddenly snaps his fingers, eyes lit up with an idea. “Derek! Let’s just do the fucking ritual and make him your full-on Second. Today. How many packs must be present for it to work?”

“Three,” Derek sighs, shaking his head in disdain. “But all of the friendly Alphas I’ve reached out to today turned me down. Someone must have said something; none of our allies are going to come, and we don’t have time to find anyone else.”

“But wait. Isn’t  there  Anna?” Danny cuts in,  persistent.  “That’s one. We only need two more.”

They all turn to Allison, who has been the lifeline between the two packs for years now and she frowns under the pressure of several sets of eyes on her. “I actually almost never saw her when I was there. She was away a lot.”

“I couldn’t get a hold of her.”

Derek doesn’t dare say out loud what he wants to, has to,  say next. He just can’t. If he says it, everything will become too real.

The unspoken accusation rattles the cage on a much smaller scale than he anticipated: they just exchange similar glances, after which Isaac voices what is on everyone’s mind, “Yeah, we kind of knew that woman was bad news.”

“Must have been her goons we heard back then in the woods after all,” Scott surmises. “Shit, she must have been in bed with those European assholes all this time, instructing them exactly how to rile us up.”

“This doesn’t matter anymore!”

Stiles surges from his seat as if it has caught fire. His energy is back but Derek feels in which direction it is going – they all do, if their terrified faces are anything to go by. He stands in the middle of the room, and Derek wants nothing more right now than to make him shut his damn mouth. He almost does it, too. The wolf aches for action, it’s scared and agitated, and that usually means an anger fit is just around the corner. It takes every inch of his human self-control to not give in.

“Listen, guys.” His posture is a bad caricature of the confident stance Stiles has returned to Beacon Hills with. His voice is a shadow of that Stiles’ voice. “All things considered, it’s easier, not to mention safer for everyone, if I just do what those people want. The contract expires next year, which means I’ll definitely come back at some point. Then we can do the ritual.”

The younger ones’ faces light up with a sliver of hope, but the others know better.

“Stiles, you know those witches,” Lydia cuts every word with razor-sharp precision. “Would they have gone through all this trouble of alienating us from the other packs, provoking Derek to renounce you, making us grow tight around you through putting you in danger – all this just to draft you for yet another task and then let you go? They’re not stupid, and neither are we. Please don’t insult us by sugarcoating the truth.”

For a moment there, Stiles looks as if he is about to accept the challenge and fight back. But in the next second a gust of wind seems to blow away his focused, hurt expression along with a fit of desperate bravado about to erupt. It was there just now, and a clash of minds, both cunning and evasive, appeared inevitable – but not anymore. Now Stiles doesn’t even notice his would-be opponent. He looks right through her and at the front door, body growing tense, and every wolf in the room tunes in on the signal. They all know the feeling, they know when it comes and what it means.

Derek is the first among the wolves to pick up on it, but Stiles is already rushing to the door a fraction of a second before the Alpha springs up, his inner wolf already taking its defensive stance, dark grey fur bristling and fangs out.

 “What is it?” Lydia’s voice sounds like a cry of some lone bird separated from her flock in between a duckweed-covered lake in late October.

The other humans only watch, perplexed, as the werewolves are already on their feet, their instinct telling them to follow their leaders.

Stiles and Derek end up at the door together when it is kicked in with an almost theatrical _bang_ and Sean steps in with what seems to be a bloody lump of flesh in his arms.

“Help! Stiles, Derek, oh thank God!”

The first thing Derek feels is stupid.

Sean joined them only a few months ago; a high school senior with a wild hair up his ass; an experiment of a sort to check if Derek has mastered the great secret of managing teenage werewolves. But the feeling rises in him not because he had obviously failed; it is because he has been so busy trying to manage the crisis that he completely forgot about Sean. Which is just so ridiculous: how could he forget about his own pack member?

It takes him another second to come to terms with the fact that, left unattended, Sean, his personal experiment, has done some serious shit, and now there’s fucking blood everywhere.

The flaming red hair and the smell he often catches on Stiles – coffee, milk, cinnamon, fresh pastry – help him identify the lump, which Stiles has already helped Sean lay on the floor. The lump is called Miranda, and she’s still breathing.

Stiles almost succeeds at staying indifferent when he and Derek exchange looks – and immediately both know what and how to do.

“Scott,” Derek commands, and when the beta leaps forward, aching to help, he calmly continues. “Grab the kit, save the girl. Now,” he addresses the other wolves, who have circled around Miranda.  “You sit next to her and try to keep her alive for the time being.”

The wolves, synchronicity in each movement, drop on their knees and find an open patch of flesh to touch and leech Miranda’s pain away. Derek turns to his most trusted humans – Danny and Lydia.

“Are you doing it?”

“On it,” Lydia waves him off with a phone pressed to her ear. “Dr. McCall? Hi. We need your help.”

“Mister Mayor,” Danny drawls into his own phone, “hi. No, we’re okay, but we need a favor.”

Heart slightly lightened but far from unburdened, Derek looks down just in time to see Stiles’ hand press to the girl’s wet forehead dabbled with constellations of pale freckles and crowned with soaked dark-red locks. He can almost see a kind of warmth, invisible but palpable, traveling slowly out of the palm and into the wounded head, enveloping it gently like a mother’s first embrace – a blanket woven from strings teeming with something occult and new to this, very werewolf-world, picture.

“That’ll keep her alive for a while,” Stiles explains to Scott, who has just plopped down and clicked open the first aid kit, his doctor face on. “You can stitch her up, she won’t feel any pain. You think we should move her?”

“No,” Scott takes in the wolves crouched over the girl, each working hard to drain her pain away. Derek is there, too. “Easier access for everybody. Just bring something clean to lay her on.”

Throughout the critical minutes, when the wolves are doing their best to focus and the humans run around the house to do the things Scott curtly instructs them to do, all Derek sees is not the sickeningly crimson gash of Miranda’s stomach with things pulsing laboriously inside; all he hears is not Sean’s desperate whimpering over his left ear – _I just lost it, Derek, I’m so sorry; she lives next door, she saw me, and something just happened; oh fuck, Jesus, is she gonna die?_

All he sees is his Second with the girl’s head in his lap. All he hears is his barely audible whisper that seems to be travelling straight into the mind of the redhead, carefully blanketed with this warm benevolent cloud. Everything else is just a distraction.

The voice is not meant for him, but he can still discern a few words every now and then in the endless stream of warmth and comfort that his Second exudes.

_It will all be all right. Stay calm and focused. We’re here. We’re friends. We’ll help. You just stay strong and wait._

On and on, combinations shuffling but the message remaining the same. The wolves who can also hear it have soon let go of the agitation. Even Sean, who is now sitting by Derek’s side in a trance-like state simply waits – just like the message said.

By the time Dr. McCall and Mayor Stilinski arrive, there is a tired, relaxed glow on everyone’s faces – Miranda seems to be out of the woods.

“You can’t possibly put a lid on this.”

The mayor tries to keep his voice down as he looks over to where his son is still slouching over the mutilated girl’s head, his lips barely moving in an indecipherable litany. Derek uneasily studies the old man’s wrinkled, dry-skinned chin, not daring to look up. He knows this is bad, and yet all he can think about now is the solid blueish block of ice forging Mayor Stilinski’s eyes when he looked at him and Stiles this morning, the way he confidently poured coffee into the mug his German guest was holding in his stupid German hands. And then – a quick glance at Stiles, an unwelcome hello from the past when Stiles was just a teenager who hated lying to his dad, but did, time after time, and then cringed and wished nothing but to disappear under the heavy stare.

 _Now you’ve done it_ , the block of ice said, and the German fucker’s lips curled slightly up at that. _Now you’ve really done it, guys._

“She is going to have to come with a plausible story for the injury,” Mayor Stilinski’s chin moves up and down again, crevasses of wrinkles around the heavyset mouth opening and closing. “The parents might not be expecting her home until evening because she was supposed to work today, but they will wonder why she’s not answering texts. So it’s either we write it off as another mountain lion attack. . .” The chin freezes, as if needing an extra moment to chew on the next few words. Derek waits. “Or you’re going to have to. . . You know.”

He doesn’t finish it, and never will – Derek knows that. The superstitious fear of the actual words is something that Mayor Stilinski still can’t get over, after so many years inside the werewolf world.

“The bite,” Derek finished for him, hoping he sounds as confident as he wants to. “Only if it gets critical again.”

“Melissa says it might.”

Derek takes a moment to glance back, at the worn out, sweaty, focused face of Dr. McCall. The woman seems calm now, but who can predict what will happen in the next minute? Poor Sean tore the redhead up pretty bad.

“If she wants me to, I will,” Derek acquiesces, and this gives him the courage to look up, into the mayor’s tired, troubled eyes. “But you’re sure no one saw the attack?”

“No.” The mayor looks almost senile when he shakes his head, neck wrinkles going askew as he does so. “She stopped by Sean’s house and he was alone there. You don’t have much time to decide, Derek.”

“I know.”

Another excruciating hour later, the girl’s eyelashes tremble, as if still not sure, still now quite there, but then the eyelids move decisively up – and her pale blue eyes take in at all the faces around her. There is no surprise in them, nor is there a fraction of the after-shock haze. The girl is fully conscious.

“Hey there.” Stiles’ voice is calm and welcoming with a sprinkle of tease and an even more subtle tremble only the werewolves register. “Is this your way of telling me you won’t be showing up for work today?”

“Boss,” she croaks out, barely audible, but relief clear in it. “You’re really here.”

“Yeah.” He looks around, catches Derek’s relieved face, lingers on it for a too-long moment. “What do you remember?”

She seems to forget the question, distracted by all the faces around her. Then she sees Sean. The guy – almost a boy still, pale oval of his face distinctly sickly with those two red circles firing up his cheeks – lunges forward, his wolf reacting faster than the human, and the girl curls up the best she can.

“Back!”

Derek is right behind Stiles the next moment, his claw-hand shielding the girl’s head, the other one on Stiles’ chest, ready to push him aside. He lets out a heavy roar that makes everyone flinch back in fear. Sean springs back, instinct pulling him down and show belly.

“Derek.”

He looks down, not quite ready to be human again – and the wolf inside him drops down to the ground, ears glued to the skull, claws at the ready, because what is looking up at him through Stiles’ eyes is not just his Second. It’s a maddeningly intertwined mix, a new breed, a unique creature – werewolf, human and witch in one bottle.

He can feel the creature’s crooked, double-tuned thoughts running up and down the invisible wire that has stretched between them. _Don’t touch me, Alpha_ , the witch says. _Show more restraint, Alpha_ , the Second echoes. _Outsiders are here_.

Sean is still down on the floor, looking tentatively up at Derek, eyes, yellow and plaintive, travelling from Derek to Stiles and back. Derek barely registers that, nor does he care for the dense, starch-like air enveloping their group, heartbeats fast, muscles tense.

All he can understand now is the stare of the creature.

 _Now calm down_ , the creature’s thought snakes its way into his brain, _and make sure everyone sees that._

For some reason, it is almost criminally easy to placate the wolf after that, to draw back the claws and make the red glow retreat.

“Sean,” he commands, and the young wolf, visibly shaken, carefully lifts himself off the floor and stands, slouching, up. “You may speak to her, but don’t come any closer.”

“It’s okay,” Miranda croaks out and has to take a moment to swallow. “It’s all right. I know he was just shocked, panicked, in pain maybe, and I just happened to be around. Sean,” her voice changes, becomes almost too mild, “I saw how you tried to contain yourself and failed. And I know you’re sorry.”

Sean looks at Derek to double-check if he is still allowed to speak. Derek nods.

“I am. I truly am. Please, Miranda, if only you could-”

“I understand.” A sweet angelic smile on her lips is too much to bear for the poor guy – he lets out a girlish sob and drops down to press his forehead to her blood-stained hand. “Sean. I do, I understand. Boss told me everything.”

She doesn’t seem to notice the explosion of fear and confusion paralyzing every pack member’s soul at that – the angelic smile doesn’t fade, which is twice as alarming considering how sane and conscious she seems.

“Miranda,” Dr. McCall gently pushes the quietly weeping Sean aside and takes both of the girl’s hands in hers, making sure she pays attention. “You need rest. You’ve been badly wounded. I’m sorry, but we couldn’t take you to the hospital because-”

“I know.” Again with the smile, unnecessary and fake in the circumstances, but still unshakably delightful. She grunts as she props herself up on the elbows to look back, where Stiles is still sitting with her long hair brushing his now empty lap. “Boss,” she quietly pleads, “it wasn’t all a dream, right? I did hear you. Down there.”

 _Down there_ , something inside Derek echoes, and the words plop down into the still lake of his thoughts to sink deeper, to the very bottom, where fears live.

Stiles puts his hands on her back to create support, then, when he feels that she is still too weak, gently presses on the top of her head to make her lie back down. His hands stay there, carelessly ghost-touching the red curls crowning his thighs. Derek wants to feel jealous but can’t eke out the feeling – being jealous now would feel equally as wrong as feeling that towards a mother caressing her child, no matter how old it is.

“Yes, down there,” Stiles repeats, and the understanding, the grateful warmth between them is overwhelming.

Derek sits down next to Stiles. It is very important, he knows, to be there, to be a part of their personal bubble.

“Miranda, hi. You know who I am?”

The girl looks up, and he can discern a vague ruddy net of capillaries reaching for the irises inside her tranquil, slightly curious eyes.

 “Sheriff. Alpha Hale.”

Derek should be more surprised at that, but he isn’t. After all, Stiles was there with her all the way through, and so was the creature dwelling inside him. The creature knows ways.

“What else do you know?”

_What else has the creature told you?_

For a moment, Miranda grows weary, eyelids heavy and swollen, dark circles around her eyes travelling south and covering half her face. Then it’s gone, and the girl who miraculously survived is back, and so are Stiles’ hands on her temples.

“I know Sean didn’t mean it when he attacked me. He was just-” a quick glance in the direction of the werewolf in question “-having a hard time coping. And I was there.”

“So,” Derek drawls, giving her a chance to keep going, but in her head, this seems to have explained everything. "Do you know why he was the way he was when you saw him?”

“Sure,” Miranda – oh sweet innocence – nods. “I do now. And I want it.”

Derek knows, as well as everyone around, what _it_ means, but asks anyway.

“What?”

Stiles hammers him with a stare, and Derek can read the message behind it.

_Give it to her. This will solve a lot of our problems._

_And create new ones_ , Derek wants to answer, but he is sure his facial expressions are not as readable.

“The bite,” Miranda says ever so simply, just like many things are in the world of a teenager. “I want it. I want to be with you guys.”

“Miranda, listen,” Derek sighs, wanting nothing more but for someone else to do this for him. “You don’t know what you’ll be signing up for. The world we live in-”

“I know,” she insists, voice more impatient now. “When I was asleep, Boss and I talked. A lot. He showed me things, his own memories. He explained all the pitfalls of the choice, all the struggles. I made the decision, and he said your word would be final. So here we are.”

“Derek,” Dr. McCall penetrates their bubble with a tentative look. “I know I don’t normally say this, but perhaps it would actually be good for the girl. The wounds are severe. I can’t guarantee she’ll survive a trip to the hospital.”

Derek wants to lash out at her, at everyone who will dare say the next word. They don’t have to – it is enough to ask the wolf, to really ask it, and listen for the answer.

The bite is quick and painless, nothing to write home about. When it’s done, Derek feels empty, used, not needed anymore. Apparently, so does Stiles, because without any word or signal they both end up outside, on the porch, with the pack taking care of the newcomer inside. A thin door is the only thing shielding them from the whirlwind of blood and animalistic spirit filling the house to the brim.

“You did well,” Stiles gives him a lukewarm, tired smile.

Derek looks at the savory, sun-lit grass in the front yard. If he could maybe just lie down there for a while – just for a minute, maybe drag Stiles down with him. They could fall asleep like this, with his wolf knowing that everything and everyone is taken care of and it’s okay to recuperate. They could wait for the day to fade and the stars to come out.

“I missed this.”

“Hm?” Stiles muses absent-mindedly.

“Dealing with shitstorms with you by my side. We’re a pretty good team, you know.”

That makes Stiles chuckle, and at least some of his muscles ease up, making his posture more genuine.

“I’ve felt that way ever since I found you in my room that day. I know it’s dumb, we barely spoke back then and you were always so damn angry.”

“And you were so insufferable.”

“Yeah. But I already felt we’d be good together. As a team.”

“Just as a team?”

“Yeah, just that. Tell you the truth, I didn’t really think of you in that way at all at first. You were just this scary dude to me.”

“Why?” Derek barely registers the way he effectively tuned out all the voices and the heartbeats from the inside of the house. Even the wolf.

“Because,” Stiles says simply, his eyes distant. “Some people are so out of your league you feel that even thinking about them is, like, breaking some law of nature or something. I didn’t even bother, honestly.”

Derek nods. On some level, he has always known that about the old Stiles, but callous as it may sound, in those days he couldn’t care less about some kid with crippled self-esteem. Now, though, when he thinks back. . .

“I remember this one time,” he scoffs softly as the memories start pouring in. “You were at school or maybe out somewhere up to no good, as usual. I was bored, so I started going through your stuff.”

Stiles gives him a half-assed offended look, “You didn’t!”

“I did.”

Stiles turns fully to him, an amused grin cracking its way onto his lips. “And? Did you enjoy my dorky manga collection and my super-secret pot stash Dad must _never_ know about?”

“There was a lot of weird shit in there, I don’t really remember the details. But I remember this feeling that all of a sudden took over me as I was in the middle of ransacking your closet – this strong, overwhelming feeling. It was like. . .”

_Warmth. Home. A sense of belonging._

“Like your smell was supposed to be on me, like it was the most natural thing to be soaked in it. I got so freaked out, you wouldn’t even know.”

“Yeah?” Stiles grins wider. “You cried?”

Actually he did, a little. The smell was too comforting, too reminiscent of the home he had lost, and he did not deserve any of that anymore. He spent a few hours in Stiles’ closet that afternoon, guiltily and greedily breathing in the smell, never wanting to remember who he was and what he’d done. It was pathetic, he thought then. Pathetic, stupid, and wrong.

“I’m sorry I shoved you around so much back then.”

It’s not what he means to say – the words just escape his mouth as soon as he opens it, but strangely, he’s not annoyed by this. It’s a strange feeling – when you lose control over something but it doesn’t matter anymore. So he goes along with it.

“I guess I was mad that your smell made me feel all those nice things, and I wasn’t ready to accept them.”

Stiles sizes him up with a long, gauging scrutiny of a stare before replying softly, “Neither of us was, Derek.”

They share a couple of awkward laughs, and then, just like it came, the moment suddenly goes away.

“I know you told Danny and Allison to keep calling the other Alphas,” Stiles’ tone effortlessly slips into the business-like coolness. “And I know they failed.”

“Yes.”

The most bitter word. Derek wants to run deep into the woods and hide from what will inevitably come next.

Instead, Stiles clears his throat, stays like this with a fist to his mouth for another long moment, and then turns quickly towards the porch steps.

 “I have to check on my shop.”

Derek watches him go, unnaturally stiff, to his car, and a small voice tells him to let it happen, to just let him open that door, pack his long body inside, turn on the ignition and drive away – away from their lives.

There is no hope. There are no more words left to say.

But he finds himself in the shotgun seat long before the rational part of him can comprehend, much less comment on his actions.

“I’m coming with. There’s clearly something eating at you, and you’re not getting rid of me until I know everything.”

Stiles doesn’t have the decency to even pretend to be surprised when he wakes up the car, ignoring the lost, confused faces of their pack huddling close on the porch like a flock of lost sheep.

“As you say, Alpha Hale.”

 

There are about a dozen of them lounging in the outside chairs who jump on Stiles with relieved _Oh thank God_ s and _Where have you been_ s as soon as Stiles pulls up. Sweet innocent folk of Beacon Hills, those who feel uneasy whenever an ounce of their established, boring routine goes awry. Mostly it’s the elderly – the grey-haired and wobbly-walking oldies of the town who have gotten used to trusting the Stilinski name and embraced the opportunity to support it by giving their voice at an election as well as enjoying a coffee and a fresh bagel. There are a couple of teens – the summer kids, careless and insanely tanned, and some in their twenties – students visiting their hometown, most likely.

“I’m super sorry, you guys,” Stiles jumps energetically out of the car and right into the skin of that other person, the friendly coffee shop simpleton whom these people have been expecting.

“We thought those bullies got you after all,” Mrs. Oberdine, a patron, wags her little wrinkled finger at him. “We assumed the worst! Me and the girls were worried sick! I was on the verge of calling the police, mind you.”

Her neighbor to the right, a plump homely  lady, touches her friend’s elbow with an age-spotted hand. “Looks like the police are already here, Margaret.”

Having been exposed by the old-timer brigade (the shame!), Derek creeps reluctantly out of the car while Stiles is already tampering with the lock.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Oberdine. Everyone’s safe.”

They bombard him with all sorts of questions, which he expertly dodges by busying himself putting the chairs down from the tables. More people seep in, turning a small group into a crowd, Stiles dives into his phone – and twenty minutes later the bakery sends a guy with fresh pastry.

“Now guys, I’m really sorry for this,” Stiles’ arms go flailing as he steps away from the counter, a long apron with the Overdrive logo in the middle around his waist, “for the way things are today. It’s been a, er, weird and rather eventful morning for me, and I simply messed up. I guess that’s what you get for being your own boss. Will you forgive me?”

They tell him to keep them bagels coming and then they’ll think about it. Oh the sweet, simple people of this town.

Derek has to wait for another half hour before Stiles finds someone decent to cover for him till the end of the day (luckily, many high school kids don’t mind an extra buck and most of them have already done similar jobs). When a pale sixteen-year-old takes over at the counter (the guy lacks in charisma but makes up for it with his impeccable manners), Stiles finally joins Derek at the pack table.

“Miranda is fine,” is the first thing Stiles says as he easily slides onto the chair opposite Derek. He has brought both of them coffee. “I can feel her as part of the pack now. Can you?”

“Yes,” Derek admits uneasily.

It is horrifying to realize he has been blocking signals from his pack this whole time, busying himself with putting down chairs and chatting away with the tongue-in-cheek-looking locals.

“You did well,” he adds, fighting with a wave of sorrow that has suddenly takes over him. And then, on pure whim, he asks, “Why did you call this place Overdrive?”

Stiles’ eyes drop down and caress the beautiful orange logo on his apron, his thoughts somewhere far away where Derek cannot follow, nor is he invited to.

“Nothing all that special, really. When I was choosing the name,” he says, “I wanted to make it more personal for me, something I would care about, you know? So I started asking myself what were the best times in my life, when I felt accomplished and, you know, great. And I asked myself why it was like this, what made me so happy.  And I remembered,” a teenage-like smirk suddenly spreads over his lips, making his face almost irresistible, “stupid, I know, but I realized that the best times for me were also the worst times – when the pack was in deep shit and we thought we were done for.”

“Hm. Why?”

It pains him to see that smirk – a glimpse of Stiles’ old self, a symbol of a time much more simple, when things were still bad but at least the world made sense.

 _Oh, Stiles_ , Derek thinks with an inward sigh. _How can you be so cruel?_

 “When the situation seemed fucked up beyond repair,” Stiles goes on, blissfully oblivious to everything, “and everyone gave up – even you, though you never showed it, - I knew it was my time to shine. My turn to save the day. I wasn’t anything special back then, as you remember. Just some kid whose only skill seemed to be annoying mopey werewolves with questionable social skills. But I knew one thing: somewhere in that messy teenage head of mine, under all the junk I cluttered my brain with – was real power, and it was better than any cool things Scott or you or the others could do.” He shrugs casually, “I called it _overdrive_. You know, when your mind goes into overdrive? That was it. The power.” He licks his lips absent-mindedly and kicks back in his seat, eyes half-shut. “I fucking loved that feeling. The rush it brought along, _God_.”

Derek nods, eyes never leaving Stiles’ face.

“You were brilliant.”

 _You say that you were nothing special then_ , he continues in his head, _but that’s a lie. You were and have always been a fighter, Stiles, we both know it. You would walk over dead bodies – hell, you have – to get what you wanted. Why are you shying away from this fight?_

It must all show all too well on his face because the half-smirk on Stiles’ face goes sour, then utterly foreign. The wolf watches. The way Stiles’ Adam’s apple moves anxiously up and down, the way his long, lovely fingers dance on the tabletop slightly, as though fiddled with by a shy puppeteer. The way his smell grows stronger, thicker.

Fear. Worry.

No, not fear – terror.

“I wasn’t completely honest with you last night, and it was unfair.”

“What are you saying?” Derek almost whispers, barely registering his lips moving.

Then a sudden shift occurs. The new Stiles takes the wheel, and the terror is crushed mercilessly. What comes after is unnatural in the circumstances – an eerie calmness, in his eyes, in his movements, in his heartbeat.

 _The heartbeat of a born killer_ , a phrase he once said to himself resurfaces, unwelcome, inside Derek’s mind.

“I feel that you need to see the whole picture before you make the decision whether to get yourself and the pack fully involved in this.”

 _That’s why you wanted to be in public_ , a flash-like realization hits Derek suddenly, and he doesn’t know what to do with the horrible knowledge. _You had a million chances to tell me, even on the way here, in the car. But you needed humans – strangers – to be around. To protect you. From me._

Stiles takes in the room surreptitiously, but the people are all preoccupied with their drinks and their snacks and their phones. Those who are still watching have the decency to do it discretely, and Derek knows they can’t hear them from such distance.

 “It’s about why I left.”

“I figured, Stiles, cut to the chase.”

A big part of him wants to be sarcastic, obnoxious, cruel even – just so that Stiles doesn’t have to.

 _Please_ , he says to no one, _don’t make him be like this._

But the person sitting opposite him and looking like Stiles is a relentless, unyielding creature who will not stop, and the notion cannot sit well with Derek.

“You were right. I could have come to you with my witch problem, we could have found a way together, or at least tried.”

“But?”

Derek can’t shut up. Something inside him – that big bully who likes flexing and shoving people around – doesn’t want the sentiment; he wants the truth, and he will beat it out of Stiles if need be.

“But I didn’t want you to be involved,” Stiles lays out calmly.

Derek’s mouth goes dry. A surge of anger that inevitably ensues gets immediately stomped on by the wolf, who couldn’t care less for sentiment. The wolf is all ears.

Stiles shrugs, the cold not leaving his eyes.

 “Everyone else had their thing. That was mine, even if it made me hate you most of the time. I was afraid you’d force me to get rid of it, for the pack’s safety. And I knew I would have gone for it if you’d just said the words – I realized the risk.”

It makes sense – what he is saying, but Derek has a feeling it is still far from the ugly truth Stiles was so reluctant to share with him. Well, hardball is a game two can play.

“So,” Derek tilts his head slightly to the right, watching, listening, “now that we got that out of the way, you could move on to telling me all the things you wouldn’t in private, with no witnesses.”

The terror is back, but just for one moment, after which the new Stiles is back.

“All right,” he says, something serpentine about the way he shifts in his seat. “No bullshit.”

“Please.”

“Mainly I left because I got cold feet about the two of us.”

 _There it is_ , the bully in Derek smirks, triumphant for some reason, as if he knew.

The wolf drops down to the ground, recognizing an old enemy. It’s hard to hear the words through the deafening growl, but Derek tries.

Stiles was seventeen when Derek told him about the position of Second he would be taking as soon as he came of age. That was also the time when he received his admission letter from Penn State and was torn between staying to help Derek build their pack and leaving. Most of the talk around school was about college and how great it would be. The careless, oblivious seniors would be fantasizing about all the crazy experimenting they would do, making lists, breaking old promises to their sweethearts.

Stiles was listening to it all, nodding with a plastered grin on his face and making up his own fantasies so as not to seem too much like an alien. And when night came, he would run around the woods and hunt, and kill monsters who were regular people by day, and spend the rest of the time freaking out over a lifelong commitment he was about to delve into.

“But you had the pack,” Derek objects, “they were going through the same.”

“They weren’t about to get basically married for life at eighteen and take responsibility for a bunch of idiots the same age as them.”

Which is true.

“You mentioned experimenting,” Derek drawls, in his core already knowing what it means, and dreading to hear the actual words. “Are you saying you weren’t ready to settle down?” Stiles nods after a moment of hesitation. “And you wanted more experience?  With. . . a girl?”

 “That, too.”

They fall silent, the connection of their stares the only thing moving, and thriving, and shivering in horror and anticipation. Then, suddenly, Derek finds himself in an absolutely quiet, peaceful part of his mind where everything makes sense to him. There is little else to do but close his eyes and listen.

It does make sense – what Stiles is saying. After all, Derek took him when he was just a boy, with no time to mull things over and decide what he wanted. Besides, their circumstances simply did not match. Derek was raised with the notion of mates, partners for life, family as the biggest treasure, while Stiles was a typical teenager, a child of the modern age where another behavior was viewed as normal.

 _And don’t forget – he had only you_ , an unwelcome clandestine voice enters his reflection. _A sixteen-year-old with zero experience – and you, a grown man with plenty of that.  I mean, come on, Derek._

The voice is right. Fuck, how could he not have seen it? Derek wants to put all that into words – and fails. Shame oozes in and trickles down his esophagus to erode his insides, and he dares not stop it. He deserves this shame.

He can feel Stiles’ hand on top of his, and only then realizes he must have been sitting like this, with his eyes drawn shut, for a good while.

“When I was in Europe,” a whisper enters, “I got-”

“I don’t want to know.”

And, surprisingly, all the voices inside him agree, even the wolf. Derek moves his hand to lock fingers with Stiles’, and the touch gives him strength to continue.

“It pains me to think about your life there, but it all doesn’t matter now. You’re here, and I will fight for you.”

Stiles finds his feet under the table and squeezes his own in between his – a silly old game they used to play when everything was simple and two-dimensional.

“But this is still not what I want to hear,” Derek presses on, even though his poor soul demands he stop the torment and start acting, goddammit. But he can’t. Not until he finds out the worst of what the warm, the familiarly-smelling person still hides. “Tell me the rest of it. It wasn't just about the money with the werewolves, was it? Back in Europe.”

"At first it was just that, I swear." Stiles averts his eyes, hands starting to shake a little. Bad sign. "But later I was contacted by this organization. And Dieter offered me. . . _Hell_ , Derek. If I told you it was the right thing to do, you wouldn't believe me."

Derek gives him a reassuring nod, fearful anticipation freezing him on the inside - but this has to be done.

"I'll try to understand. Tell me."

And Stiles does.

Derek gulps the words down so avidly that he doesn’t seem to comprehend half of them – so strong is the delirium that washes over him, so vivid the images, pieces of memories he could not hide well enough after all these years.

 _Mom_.

“Sometimes the witches and I would collaborate with the hunters. . .”

_Dad._

“. . . cruel things. . .”

_All his family._

“. . . packs dying. . .”

_Burning._

Derek gets up. His body sways, not able to get itself together. He feels disassembled and then wrongly placed together. Stiles is there – Derek can feel a hand on his back. Stiles says something. The words mean nothing – they are just noise.

“. . . I was afraid to put you all in danger. If anyone found out. . .”

His wolf raises its head. Bares its teeth. It is hurt and hungry.

“Derek!”

“Let go of me.”

“. . . If the witches tell the other packs about what I was doing . . .”

 The burning – the _burning_! Hot blisters on his skin, breaking out and incarnating too fast for his brain to notice that. Half of his hair is gone. Laura is there. Her firm shoulder stifling his sobs. The darkness growing restless inside.

Derek doesn’t know where he finds the power to crush this part of him, at least for a while. Stiles was right to not want to tell him this. He was right. He shouldn’t have.

They are suddenly outside, with a couple of locals rubbernecking from the inside of the coffee shop, their expressions not tongue-in-cheek anymore.

Derek looks down to see Stiles’ hand clutching Derek’s upper arm. Stiles’ heart rate is insane.

“Derek,” he calls again, firmly. “Do you hear me?”

The wolf can smell the enemy rejoicing from the other side of those eyes. The _witch_! The witch’s doing – all this! The wolf wants to sink its teeth in that face, rip and gnaw and claw his way in until it wipes that vexatious smirk off that ugly face. _The witch must die_ , the wolf chants in its rough animal language, _let the witch bleed._

“Let _go_ ,” Derek growls, the wolf almost breaking free from the grasp of the human inside him.

“Calm the _fuck_ down,” Stiles hisses. “People are watching.”

Oh, wolf, please not now. Please, you’ve been so good. Go back. Retreat. Just don’t.

“Stiles.” But the wolf cannot hear him anymore, and the human inside Derek can only say one more word – the only thing he still has control of, “ _Go_.”

 

The next two hours are a blur. Derek comes to on all fours and in the middle of the woods, so deep that no critter runs away when he shifts back. The inside of his head seems to be melting, and his vision doubles.

What happened?

He plods to the nearest tree and presses his bare back to its scabrous trunk, then slides slowly down, welcoming the painful scratch. Then he lies down on the grass and curls into a ball. This is what he always did as a cub, he suddenly remembers. He did it when he accidentally scratched his younger cousin a little too deep and everyone was furious, he did it when everyone was dead and even Laura was not enough to save him from the reality of that.

He did it when Stiles vanished, and the wolf did not understand.

 _And here you are doing it again_ , a voice enters his boiling brain. Derek shudders in horror. The voice is Laura’s. _You managed to overpower your wolf, keep it in line, you got back on track. And now all you want is to go astray again, roam around half-conscious and alone. Way to go, bro._

 _He killed werewolves_ , Derek barks at her, now remembering. _Families. He’s a criminal, just like Kate._

_Is he though?_

_What do you mean?_

_What did he say exactly? Did he use the word “family”?_

Derek sits up, suddenly very much aware of his human skin absolutely unprotected. He looks at the gap between his knees. What _was_ it that Stiles said?

_“Packs”. He said “packs dying”._

_And have you ever met a pack that was not a family?_

Derek doesn’t answer that. He knows she knows.

 _You have also killed packs_ , _brother_ , Laura chuckles quietly. _Do you remember the last time you and Stiles hunted together? You killed the whole pack that night, you and your wolves. Because they were a nuisance, and a threat._

Derek springs up at that, his feet dragging him somewhere while the wolf is quiet. Laura follows him.

_We are talking about Stiles, the boy who lost his mother and almost lost his father many times. Stiles, whose mate lost his whole family. You really believe this person would be capable of killing the innocent?_

Derek shivers as the thought takes root inside his head. He breaks into a panicked jog when it fully hits home, but Laura cannot stop haunting him until she finishes.

_Why, you think. Why did he make it seem as if he were this ruthless criminal stomping on cubs as he set fire to their house? But don’t you think, little brother, that all he wants now is to protect you and the others?_

_He could have just come with the witches_ , Derek retorts, gaining speed.

  _Oh, but brother. He returned because he believed he could make it work. Could you really blame the guy for hoping?_

 _What are you saying?_ Derek growls angrily as the wolf inside him raises its head, smelling a big fight ahead of them. _That he tricked me into flipping out? That he will go with the witches tonight?_

 _And leave you_ , Laura adds in an ominous tone. _Because in his head, this is the only way to save you._

_NO!_

Laura only grants him a sad little laugh – and then the laugh dissipates slowly. Derek has heard enough. He runs, legs and lungs burning, thoughts rushing into his head, one crazier than another. When he reaches the tree where he left his things (his instinct let him use the same spot as usual), he already has a plan. A shaky one, granted, but a plan still.

He starts off by dialing Scott.

 

“You want us to _what_ now?”

Scott looks around, catching the same confused looks from Isaac and Boyd, then turns back to face their relentless, stoic and, apparently absolutely deranged Alpha.

“I want you to fight me,” Derek explains again, a little more impatient this time. “And I want you to win.”

Scott has so many questions swarming inside his head at this point – but then, all of a sudden, a strange sense of calmness takes over him, something akin to enlightenment maybe. He looks around again, counting. Three Betas. One very determined Alpha.

“Oh.”

And then he can’t help it – he chortles like a happy child whose world is crystal-clear and all too simple.

“Oh that’s clever, Derek.”

 

 

“Hey, are you okay, Mr. Stilinski?”

The new guy – what’s his name? – grows pale when he darts a quick glance at Stiles.

 _Oh, I’m with you, buddy_ , he thinks, imagining how he must look now. If it didn’t hurt so bad, he would laugh at the way the guy’s round eyes are bulging out now.

He catches a few frowns and worried glances from the people inside the shop, and this drives him to straighten up and put on a normal face. He even manages a weak bullshit smile, which, strangely, is enough to make them let him off the hook.

Everything hurts. The pain is strikingly similar to what he felt back in Europe several years ago, when his teacher tore both his arms off in a dream that was part of his training. In a way, the situation is the same: he is losing limbs that help him function, and someone is out there, having a good fucking laugh about it.

It is torture to wait another minute, but he does anyway – just to make sure the coffee shop will be fine without him. He instructs the new guy as to what to do at the end of the day, and then, when no one seems to be looking, slips out.

Already in the car, he dials Derek. No answer. He then tries Scott, Boyd, Isaac – the ones whose loss he felt only a few minutes ago. Then another wave of pain hits him.

_Lydia._

_Danny._

_Miranda._

As if someone pulled the switch and the electricity connecting them all together went down. There are only a few he can still feel, Derek included, which means he is all right. For now.

_Fucking Dieter and his fucking squad!_

He starts the engine.

Unbelievable! Yes, those guys are grade-A dicks, but they would never simply kill an innocent supe – this is taboo. But then, another thought enters his mind as he floors it through the sleepy streets. Maybe they’re not dead. After all, Dieter gave him a day to make up his mind, and there are still six hours left till midnight. He wouldn’t just break the agreement and start killing off everyone Stiles loves.

But the pain of the separation is there, and it’s all too real. By the time Stiles reaches the station, he must have broken a dozen traffic rules, but who cares? He rushes in, heart pumping madly, eyes watering with worry and pain that still hasn’t subsided.

_Scott. Boyd. Isaac. Lydia. Danny. Miranda._

He doesn’t care to put on a straight face when he runs up to the nearest person in uniform.

“Where’s Derek?”

The woman – he has known her for years, but for the life of him can’t remember her name now – clearly does her best hiding her surprise as she calmly instructs, “Last time I saw him, he was fixing something in the detention cell. Why?”

Derek is really there, but he isn’t fixing anything. All he does is just sit there on the bed with his phone out, most likely reading a book, face absolutely unreadable. Stiles stops dead in his tracks and does a double-take.

What the hell? Can’t he _feel_ it too?

“Derek!”

The book must be really gripping because Derek doesn’t so much as move a muscle. That asshole! Stiles rips the cell door open and steps in, anger inside almost making him breathe fire.

“Derek, what the fuck is g-”

The next moment he finds his body making a painful, stomach-churning somersault – and then his left cheek is crushed into the cold floor, cheekbone wailing in pain, and his arms are twisted swiftly behind his back, making him hiss and inhale the coat of dust his face is pressed into.

 _Click_.

He knows the sound. All be damned if he doesn’t know it!

Derek drags him up roughly, checks the handcuffs, then pushes him onto the bed where he himself was just sitting – and then simply marches out of the cell.

 _Clank_ – there goes the lock.

For a moment there, Stiles forgets the now almost chronic ache inside his chest as he flounders for answers. The witch inside him doesn’t need time to adjust though – the witch has been locked up before, and it sure as hell is not letting that asshole Alpha boss them around.

From the outside, it looks as if an invisible force starts yanking on the lock: one, two, three angry pulls. Derek is unimpressed.

“I could come in there again and knock you out if that makes it easier for you.”

“ _Don’t get cocky with me, you fucker!_ ” the witch shrieks and yanks again, hard.

Derek’s hand covers the lock. What he says next comes in a low, warning growl.

“Try that again – and I’m coming in.”

The witch itches for a fight, and Stiles can feel toxic red filling up his irises, a sort of murderous haze clogging his brain.

_No! Stop!_

To quell all this energy inside him is something Stiles has become good at over the years, but every time the aftermath of the confrontation leaves him ripped at the seams and aching for that part of him he just has to suppress. In the end, the witch retreats. Stiles quietly sits on the hard mattress, eyes cast down obediently. This is no time to fight. His pack is in danger.

“What is going on?”

Derek is silent, grafted to his phone again, but Stiles doesn’t need any witch skills to read his Alpha like a book. The tense shoulders. The thin line of his lips on a pale face. The vertical wrinkle between his eyebrows that only makes its appearance when Derek is mad or worried beyond measure.

“I know you’re not feeling them either,” Stiles tries again, and never have prison bars been more of an impediment for him than here, now. “Do you know what happened? It wasn’t me, in case you’re wondering.”

Derek gets up with an exasperated sigh, but that telltale wrinkle is still there. Stiles fixates on it as if it were the only lifeline between him and the world he wants to save so desperately.

“Don’t talk. You stay there until I say so, and no tricks – see the camera up there?”

Another lock makes its awful, ominous _clank_ – and now there are two locked doors between them. Then the lights go off.

 

_They’re gone._

A horrified, charged whisper he doesn’t recognize as one of his voices enters the void.

_What are you saying?_

_They’re all gone. They’re dead, that’s what happened. One by one, dropping like flies._

And then he can't press his face into the gap between his folded legs hard enough. His lungs seem to spasm, crushing in whatever air was trapped inside. Stiles makes himself exhale and curls up on the too narrow bed reeking of intense desperation of dozens and dozens. This bed will offer no comfort.

Bile rises from his empty stomach, and for a moment there, he is genuinely scared that if he throws up, half of his organs will fall out of him.

_Dead?_

He doesn’t believe that. Not really. Mostly because his witch is one stubborn fucker, and it won’t accept defeat.

Dieter promised he'd let him go, didn’t he? Back then, in Europe. They shook on it, and Dieter respects the law above all. The sane part of him is inclined to agree, but then again, he has never trusted his sane part to make any decisions in dire situations. No, when calamity avalanches and alarm circulates around his body along with blood in dizzying proportions, it’s not his sanity that is given a weapon and an order to make things right. It’s the other part – the one too asinine to admit defeat, the one that swims in the turbulent waters of insights and bravado. The one that knows _overdrive_.

Except that part is crushed now, lamenting the bleeding stumps in his soul that used to be strings.

 _Scott, Boyd, Isaac, Lydia, Danny, Miranda_. If he says these names fast enough and with enough intention, he just might turn back time and get those strings back.

The darkness, though. It creeps closer with his every labored breath, and his muttering is something that he has to fight the haze in his head through to become aware of. It takes yet more time to understand the words escaping his lips.

“My fault. My fault. My fault. They’re dead. Scott. Boyd. Isaac.”

 _Shut up!_ the witch roars inside him suddenly, and his knee-jerk reaction is to sit up with his back straight. _You know Dieter, he’d never kill the innocent!_

_But Derek. Didn’t you see his face?_

_What does it matter?_

_Derek’s strings got cut too._

The darkness shrouds him in desolation, and the muttering resumes.

 

 

Stiles barely registers the reality of the familiar face, solemn and all too grown-up, looming over him.

“It’s time, Stiles. Come on, get up. Turn around, I need to uncuff you.”

He obediently follows the face. There is nothing else to do. What was once throbbing and burning bright inside his chest and called itself a heart is now empty, drained of any emotion – the darkness took it all. He stupidly puts one foot in front of the other for what seems like miles. Then, suddenly, someone switches on the light inside his mind, illuminating the wreck of what’s inside, and he begins to comprehend the reality around.

It’s a parking lot. The police department parking lot, which he knows like the back of his hand. It feels funny to be standing in the middle of something so normal, so routine-like – a fragment of his old life. To be here and to feel so desolated inside.

 _It’s late_ , a bleak voice inside him points out, his eyes wandering around the empty space under the dome of the night sky, Scott’s car being one of the few that are left. He sucks in a long shaky breath, then looks up. It’s almost the full moon. All the wolves must be on edge now. They must need him back at the house.

Then it hits him – _Scott is real_.

 “Scott?”

“What?” Scott, who was about to slip into the driver’s seat with careless ease, promptly pushes himself out. His stare is hawk-eyed with a slither of worry somewhere in the mix. “You finally came to?”

There is still no string. The stump that used to be it pulses violently inside Stiles’ chest, the pain from it almost blinding, - but Scott _is_ real. Here he is, with his stupid goofy face and the wary posture of one puzzled wolf.

Stiles takes another deep breath. When there’s nothing else left, there’s always a breath – that’s what his magic teacher used to say. After a long controlled exhale he can feel the other lights in his mind gradually switching on.

So Scott is alive, and he is real. So is the severed connection between them. Huh.

“Get in,” Scott jumps back in after taking a glance at his wristwatch, “we don’t have time to spare, you nutjob. Didn’t even recognize me back in the cell, what’s up with that?”

Stiles obliges.

It takes another minute of driving through mostly dead streets for all the lights to come alive inside his head. Now he’s ready to compute the situation.

Okay, here goes. Since Scott is clearly alive and kicking, the rest are also probably fine, although it doesn’t make the situation any less weird. Derek obviously knew, because Scott is only capable of staying so composed under pressure when he’s following the Alpha’s orders. So yeah, Derek knew, and he still left Stiles alone in a cell with the thought that most of his pack had been eviscerated. Why?

Slumbering stores with dark unreadable signs on them, houses only half-asleep, almost winking playfully at the passers-through with one or two yellow windows. Somewhere in between watching those houses and the tense downward curve of Scott’s mouth Stiles makes a decision to go for broke.

“Where are we going and why can’t I feel you?”

The corner of Scott’s mouth goes up just one bit as if he finds the questions funny somehow. Stiles isn’t mad about that – his brain is far too busy thinking of possible reasons of this happening. Correction: he knows the reasons. What his mind is feeling for now is the purpose. But the witch is still aloof, and so is his Overdrive.

He tries anyway.

“I know it has something to do with the witches.”

It feels foreign to use his dominant tone now, and Scott knows it too. Look at him getting all tense and weirded out. But hey, what else has he got? Stiles goes on.

“It’s almost midnight, so you’re clearly taking me to the meeting with them. Which means you and Derek have a plan. Tell me what it is.”

For a short moment there’s distinct hesitation on Scott’s face, but it doesn’t live long. After a short inner fight his face turns masklike – and goddammit, if only they were still connected! Oh Scotty boy, what the hell are you up to? Don’t you know now is not the time to parade your gall around?

All his other questions fall on deaf ears – after all, Scott is Derek’s Chief Beta for a reason. When he’s given an assignment, he delivers. Soon Stiles gives up simply turns away. Maybe it’s for the best. Whatever Derek has in mind, it might just be crazy enough to work, and if it is so, he’d like to see that. But then again. . .

 

 _I understand your, hmm, compulsion to come back_ , Dieter’s sonorous voice with slight German accent resurfaces suddenly from the dispassionate sea of memories that is his past.

There were standing just outside the interrogation room, where three shackled werewolves were trying their best to not let their fear known to their captors. It was a regular day, nothing out of the ordinary. “A boring Tuesday”, as their Russian comrades liked to joke.

Except this day was somehow different. Perhaps it was the hurried glance the Alpha had cast at his Second right before getting thrown onto the ground by a binding spell, and blood, dark in the moonlight, gushed out of his mouth like a creature breaking free. The apology in that look. The regret that he was not strong enough.

 _I miss my pack_ , was all Stiles said because it is always better to be truthful with a witch, especially if this witch is Dieter. Who, by the way, didn’t even care to act surprised.

 _You’re doing important work here_ , Dieter placed a reassuring hand on Stiles’ shoulder. _Those beasts over there – you know how many people and witches they’ve killed. Especially that deplorable Alpha and his Second. Scum of the earth, that’s what they are, Stiles._

 _I know_.

He was studying his dirty, ragged army boots. In the dim light of the hallway they seemed pristinely and deceivingly brown – not a smear of blood on them. There was a peculiar sound haunting him inside his own head, a very distinct _crack_ which he seemed to care more about than he did about this conversation.

He closed his eyes and asked his witch to help him remember. The memory that sprang at him right after was a fresh one – just an hour or so old. He saw that couple again, those beasts, as Dieter called them. The _crack_ was the Second’s spine as he had leaped forward trying to cover the Alpha with his body, but the spell was too powerful for him.

Had the Second known? Of course. But in the werewolf world, when it comes to home, and family, and protection, no logic or sense of self-preservation stands a chance.

 _I have to go back_ , he said quietly, for the first time admitting to himself that there was no other way for him anymore. He just had to.

Dieter’s eyes would always get this special little glimmer whenever he got news he really hated. That was the moment it clicked for Stiles that this was not the end of their story – not by a long shot. He pushed the realization away then, because the image of that Alpha, caked with his Second’s blood and guts, was stronger than the fear of retaliation.

No other way. He had to go back and protect his own Alpha.

 _I see_. Dieter pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans and started swaying bath and forth, his head tilted to the left, giving him an innocent and curious look. All an act, of course. _What about the wife?_

 _You mean ex-wife?_ Stiles barely managed to keep his voice calm. _What about her?_

_Nothing, forget it. But Stiles, you’re our trump card. Without you we’d be lucky enough to cover half as many cases. I know today was, well, a bad day. I hate blood just as much as you, but will you just give it a little more thought?_

Stiles turned away.

_Don’t try to pull this guilt-trip routine on me, I’ve already decided._

Dieter was so obviously feeling out for reasons to tether him to this land, and obvious was not Dieter’s style. No, there was more behind his little interrogation, and as much as Stiles liked to praise himself for his wits, the message was lost on him.

It took him a few months and two life-threatening attacks in Beacon Hills to catch on.

It wasn’t what bound him to that place Dieter had been after that day. It was what he could use against him to separate him from his pack. There was nothing back in Europe that could outweigh it, and so Dieter took another route. To punish Stiles for leaving by giving him time to reconnect with his pack and then yank it away from him so that there was nothing more to return to.

 _That_ was Dieter’s style.

“We’re here.”

Scott kills the engine, but Stiles stays put. _Don’t go out there!_ he wants to scream, his right hand suddenly itching to slap someone, or maybe clench into a fist – he doesn’t know what the hand wants, what he wants. _Whatever your plan is, it will not work, not on that devil. He will not stop, do you understand?_

He would try to force Scott into submission, but the stump – the fucking _stump_ is all he has left of that privilege, and it hurts to even think about it. If he were younger, he would find a way. Stupidity is blind to real danger and often succeeds – exhibit A, he survived his teens. But this is more than a random threat he was dragged into by his idiot werewolf friend. This time, he was the idiot.

Stiles gets out. He knows these woods like the back of his hand, but the serene feeling of security that always used to envelop him the moment he stepped inside is gone now. The air is tense, and so are the trees, the grass underfoot, the very earth that lies deeper. It’s like the whole world – their little, precious world of Beacon Hills – has been galvanized into action, but it’s not quite time yet, not until the whistle blows.

And would you look at that, there goes the whistle.

Derek puts his hands on Stiles’ shoulders and takes a good look at him.

“He sane now?” he turns to Scott.

Stiles shakes out of his hold.

“Go shit up a rope, asshole. That sane enough for you?”

“Yeah, sorry, Derek,” Scott says in a small voice, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably. “Forgot to text you.”

Then the others pop up around them, their hands touching Stiles for reassurance, their voices all mashed up in one huge _we’re sorry_.

“Derek didn’t let us tell you,” he hears Lydia’s voice somewhere near his left ear when the pack, all tightly pressed to each other with Stiles in the middle, sets off. “He thought you might freak out and bail again. I’m sorry we got you so worried.”

Stiles shuts his eyes and lets the others lead him.

 _Scott, Boyd, Isaac,_ his own whisper with the undertones of upcoming insanity echoes in the void of his head. _Lydia, Danny, Miranda._

It’s exhausting to not understand something.

“But also,” Lydia goes on, remorse quickly dissipating from her tone, “you kind of should have figured it out, you dumbass. When I heard you were going crazy with grief in that cell I almost came down there myself to smack your stupid head against those bars. I mean, seriously? You should up your game if you really want to be our Second, Stilinski.”

The moon illuminates their path, and as the pack keeps on walking, faces solemn on the surface and a little giddy a layer deeper, it suddenly clicks for Stiles.

He looks around. Scott, Boyd and Isaac – the strongest betas. Lydia and Danny – humans. Miranda – a newcomer, they have weaker ties to the pack than the others.

 _Ha_ , he muses inwardly. He feels like cracking up one of those loony grins the pack’s enemies know all too well on him. It seems like a loony grin moment. _That’s actually kind of clever, Derek._

It’s still a dangerous stunt to pull though, and now the incarceration makes total sense – if Stiles had caught on early, he’d probably have left town alone. Or not. It’s not that easy to remain a hero inside your own head, where no thought or fear is secret.

But what’s done is done, and it looks like they’re doing it. Derek walks in front of the group, his confident stride giving every pair of eyes that might be watching a message – the Hale pack will not bend. Stiles wants to break free from the pack’s tight, loving embrace and walk next to Derek, their steps and breaths in unison, like in the old days. Like they are supposed to. It would be nice, but also wrong. The witches must not suspect they have a plan that’s just crazy enough to work, and right now the impression they’re giving with the formation is that the Alpha, refusing to acknowledge his defeat, strives to save face with this in-your-face bravado, but the others know better, and they instinctively cling to the Second they are about to lose. Which is also very, very clever.

The meeting point Dieter chose is a clearing far enough from the road to protect the transaction from human attention, but not too far – after all, those witches have only had the worst experiences with werewolves (thanks, European brethren, you dicks). They know how to play with the beasts, but they never get carried away.

Dieter is already there with his squad. Stiles knows he’s not supposed to, but he can’t help feeling a little excited to see his old gang. All horrible bullshit aside, they did have some good times together, not to mention all the magic he learned from them. Especially Dieter.

“Stiles,” Dieter greets him with a grin that actually seems genuine. “Tell your wolvies to move aside a little, will you? I want to have a good look at you, my friend.”

 Derek and some of the others growl menacingly, which only makes the German smile wider.

“Oh, trust me, friends, compared to the wolves we have back home you Americans seem like a collection of cute plush toys some girl hugs in her sleep. Alpha Hale, what is your decision?”

Stiles can’t force his eyes away from Dieter. It’s alarming and a little disappointing how after all the shit this guy’s dragged him through he still can’t produce any real hatred for him. In a way, he even admires his wits a little, because this is what witches do to get ahead in life – they use their heads. How can he, a fellow witch, despise Dieter for doing what’s the most natural thing for him?

Derek takes two steps forward, his back too straight, his shoulders so tense it feels as if they can break any moment. The witches remain in their positions, their eyes glittering with wary curiosity.

“Before we continue,” Derek says calmly, “let me see that contract again.”

“Why?” Dieter tilts his head slightly to the side as if it were easier to see through Derek’s intentions from that angle. “Didn’t you get a good thorough look at it this morning?”

“Humor me.”

With a mocking _huh_ Dieter reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket. Stiles’ knee-jerk reaction is to turn away as soon as he sees the damned sheet. In his mind, that sheet is the epitome of all the dumb decisions he has ever made in his life. Derek didn’t say it when he saw Stiles’ signature on that dirty thing, but his expression was telltale enough – Stiles easily recognized it because for years after he has been feeling exactly the same about himself. Abandoning his pack was one thing – arguably, but forgivable anyway. But signing the document which devalued the role entrusted to him, a human, by a werewolf pack – that was a serious blow. And that Stiles, were he the Alpha in question, could hardly find it in him to forgive.

“Everything all right? We haven’t changed a word since morning, witch’s honor,” Dieter chuckles, but the carefree expression with which he greeted the pack melts away, revealing the composed alert behind it Stiles was used to seeing in their better days.

Derek finishes pretending to read the paper, after which flips it over to pretend to look for something.

“Yeah, this crap has no legal value. No supe court will recognize it as valid.”

 _Here we go_ , Stiles tenses up. He can feel the witch inside him twisting and turning, but he’s not quite sure what it wants to do. To get out and fight? But on which side?

“Excuse me?” Dieter, the fucker, somehow manages to sound impeccably civil.

Derek flips the contract to the German and gives it a little shake, “It says here that Stiles is a beta. He’s actually not. He’s my Second.”

The witches were probably expecting a better line of defense, judging by the relieved grins that immediately flourish on all their faces.

“Oh, Alpha Hale,” Dieter sighs, doing an outstanding job at sounding condescending. “Haven’t we been through this? Do you really want to take your chances here? Because any decent supe lawyer will tell you you’ll lose.”

From his position, Stiles can only see Derek’s back, but he can imagine his eyebrows going up at that.

“Why? It’s you who screwed up by signing an invalid document with our Second, not us. And then you came here and terrorized him – hell, almost killed him a couple of times. You conspired with the local Alphas by spreading lies or half-truths about him, I’m not sure which, and then you almost made us believe that you have any right being here and doing all this. We’ve had enough. You and your henchmen need to leave our territory now, Witch Dieter.”

“Oh?”

Dieter tries his best to look composed, but Stiles has known this guy for far too long not to pick up on a few red flags that only another witch can see. The way his energy field stirs, disrupted, and starts rippling like water surface from a gust of wind. The way his hands start moving, fingers up, up, up, pumping energy from the earth. Getting ready for a big fight.

But then suddenly another person crashes their little midnight party, and Stiles almost slaps himself when he recognizes the energy shield which has been covering her all this time. He has seen this technique before, how could he miss it?

The woman stands next to Dieter, and by the way she keeps her distance from the witch and inches closer to Derek Stiles figures out who this is.

“Anna, what the fuck?” Derek confirms his suspicion with an irate grumble.

“Derek, don’t be stupid,” the woman pleads, and Stiles suddenly realizes that she is scared out of her wits, but not for her life.

Huh. Interesting.

“What?!”

“If you defy them, you’ll lose Talia! I won’t be able to protect her alone, not with what’s about to come next! Please, stop protecting that _vile_ human! Think about her!”

Derek gives a full-on roar at that, switching to the language only werewolves understand. She replies with a beseeching, hurt whimper, and even Stiles can hear apology in it. So Derek was right – it was Anna who’d set all the pack’s allies against them. Stiles briefly wonders what Dieter had told the woman to make her hate him so much. Might have been all true – after all, he did participate in many werewolf executions, but Dieter might have left out the part where all of the executed were actual criminals with dozens of victims, supe and human, under their belts. Stiles has always admired Dieter a little for the way he could fiddle with the truth. Facts were like clay in his hands, and he was a very skilled sculptor.

No wonder this Anna person hates his guts now.

The two Alphas, both half-shifted, bodies rigid, end their standoff abruptly when Anna yells, “He’s not your real Second, Derek, fucking get over it!”

Everything that happens next looks so well-rehearsed and meticulously concerted that Stiles doesn’t even get a chance to throw in his two cents – he simply doesn’t have the time. Days later, when he goes back to that scene in his mind, he will remember how easily Derek shifted back to his human form, how quickly his expression went from murder-thirsty to calm and composed. And Stiles will recognize that last expression, and he will know exactly how Derek must have felt in those moments. Who else would know all about the way Overdrive feels under your skin and on the inside of your brain cortex better than him?

This is a play-by-play of the expertly executed concert that follows.

Act 1. Derek ignores Anna’s holler. Instead, he turns back to face his pack and gives them all a small nod.

Act 2. Movement begins. Scott, Boyd and Isaac step away from Stiles, and so do the other three Stiles lost a connection with earlier tonight. Lydia stands behind Scott, Danny – behind Boyd, Miranda – behind Isaac, in three neat little files, and even though Stiles has already figured it all out, it still feels wrong and menacing to see the three ex-betas’ eyes glow red simultaneously.

That’s why they’ve been clinging to him so tight all this time. It wasn’t just to send the witches a message. They didn’t want the enemy to feel that the Hale pack is not actually one unit anymore.

Stiles has attended a Second’s initiation ceremony once before, and he knows how things are supposed to go. Unlike witches with their cumbersome preparations and over-the-top rituals, werewolves are creatures of action, and they couldn’t care less for the way their rites look like to outsiders. Efficiency over grandeur – that’s the werewolf way.

Derek stands facing Stiles. The weight of his hand on Stiles’ shoulder is reassuring and burdening at the same time, because now comes the most dangerous part – Act 3.

“What the-“ Dieter chokes on words. “Can they do that?”

Anna doesn’t reply, and when Stiles catches her confused, hurting expression, he can’t help feeling sorry for the woman. To her, what Derek is doing now looks like paving the way to the demise of their lives, relatively peaceful and questionably satisfying until Stiles showed up – but nevertheless safe.

“I’m sorry, Anna,” Stiles mouths to her, and before the witches could fully comprehend what those crazy Yankee werewolves are actually up to, he raises both hands and gives his witch a clear command. Three words.

 _Knock yourself out_.

The witch laughs.

 

It’s all very easy after that. Stiles’ offensive spell knocks the witches and Anna off their feet and presses them to the ground, just like Stiles and his comrades used to do a lot with dangerous werewolves back in Europe. The next spell erects a bright yellow dome around the pack. It’s by far not as strong as the ones Dieter can make, but fuck Dieter, he’ll be out of it till it’s all over anyway.

Scott, Boyd and Isaac all take turns saying the words – and it looks like Derek has actually made them rehearse because even Scott doesn’t mess his lines up.

“I, Alpha McCall, acknowledge human Stiles Stilinski as your Second, Alpha Hale.”

“I, Beta Mahealani of the McCall pack, bear witness to this,” Danny responds formally.

The others follow suit. Derek gives each of them a curt nod of appreciation, does a solemn scent-marking – and then it’s all over. Werewolves don’t like beating around the bush, amen to that.

“And,” Derek suddenly interferes just as Stiles is about to exhale with relief along with the others, “while we’re all still here, dear, ahem, Alphas. . . Could I make another announcement I’d like you to bear witness to?”

The “alphas” exchange sideways glances.

“Derek,” Scott whispers, “what the fuck? It’s over, wrap it up. We’ve got to get a move on before those evil fucks come to.”

Derek only gives them all a knowing smile – something the old Derek never, ever used to showcase. Knowing smiles are Stiles’ territory, thank you very much, just as genius last-ditch attempts to get the pack out of the shitter.

“Stiles,” Derek says gently as he presses on Stiles’ shoulder to make him focus. He looks incredibly calm, too calm for this impromptu whatever this is, and it’s unnerving.

“Listen.”

His voice is warm, and suddenly Stiles finds his heart beating against his ribcage like it’s gone mad. What’s happening? What is this? His mouth goes dry, and his hands start trembling all of a sudden, so he digs his fingers deep into Derek’s sides.

_Oh please tell me it’s something good._

The protective shield hisses around them, reacting to his panic. It won’t last long – Stiles has been out of practice the last couple of months, and Dieter will have no problem taking it down as soon as he comes to. Stiles should say all that, warn them – hell, do something! But he stays still, eyes firmly locked with Derek’s, and there goes all his determination. He can’t move a muscle, he just can’t – not until he hears what Derek has to say. 

Derek swallows audibly, and from that small movement of his throat Stiles suddenly realizes that his Alpha – _his_ now, yes – is absolutely terrified. Somehow, it seems fitting.

“I’m addressing the witch part of you now,” Derek finally finds his voice. “What should I call it?”

“Just,” Stiles shrugs, effectively losing all control over his mouth, “I don’t know. ‘Hey, asshole’ would suffice, I guess.”

“Oh my God, shut up, you idiot, this is a serious moment,” he hears Scott hissing behind his back, but a wave of nervous, relieved giggles does run through their ranks.

For a moment, Derek’s eyes glitter with an amused sparkle too, and then it’s gone.

“Just address me directly,” Stiles tells him, trying not to sound all too squeaky. “It’s listening.”

And it really is. It’s a strange feeling – to be tuned in on another creature’s thoughts while this creature lives inside your head and, for the most part, _is_ you. But then again, what is _not_ strange about his life?

Derek moves a little closer, and the world goes into slow motion.

“Stiles, you’re officially my Second now, and it’s fantastic news. For me. For you – I’m not so sure, seeing how your witch part almost made you ditch us for good because it wasn’t impressed with the title.”

“Derek, land the plane,” Scott urges, “the evil fucks are starting to wake up.”

Derek takes a quick glance at the figures lying on the ground outside the shield, and so does Stiles. Yes, the witches are coming to, but there’s still time– the spell Stiles used leaves its victims with a sense of splitting headache and loss of motor functions for a minute or so after waking up.

“Anyway,” Derek turns back to him, body growing tense again, “what I’m saying is I get it. And I want to make things right for both of us, so here’s the deal: do you want to be the pack’s First Witch?”

 “What?”

Stiles says this in unison with at least four more voices. Looks like this part was a surprise to them all, after all.

“Is this even a thing? What does it mean? Derek, did you make it up?”

“Yes,” Derek answers with a hurried, confused nod, “but someone came up with this whole Second thing and the stupid ritual at some point in history, and before that someone appointed the first Alpha and called the others Betas. Things and titles are made up, Stiles, and then they become real. And if that’s the case, who says we can’t write our own rules?”

Stiles takes a moment to pretend to think it over. In truth though, he needs this sliver of a moment to collect whatever is left from his sane, rational thoughts and get them to fucking work and make out one normal sentence – one that contains actual words and not just some incoherent sounds of excitement and pure affection.

 _First Witch_. Derek created a whole new title to make him – the whole of him – feel wanted. He went against all supe conventions and traditions and actually welcomed a _witch_ into a _werewolf_ pack.

Fucking Derek Hale.

“So I guess that means I’ll be the world’s first First Witch?”

Derek picks up on the smug tone and grins, “Guess so. That okay by you?”

 Stiles quiets his rambling emotions down for a second and listens to the depths of his mind. What is the witch thinking now? What does it want?

It’s strange. Ever since he found out about the witch, he could always discern – made a point of discerning – its emotions from his own, and its thought processes from his. It was like a never-ending debate inside his head. But now it’s all just. . . quiet. Calm. He listens closer, but there’s still nothing. Not a bad nothing, not like there’s an aching void inside him or any dramatic shit like that. No. More like if the witch part of him has finally integrated with the rest of his mind, and did so gracefully and peacefully, as though the integration was a relief.

 _Huh_ , Stiles thinks, making a mental note to sort this mess out at some point.

He’ll do all the pondering later, when there are no pissed off/spell-hungover European witches after their asses.

“Derek, you brilliant fuck.”

He pulls Derek in for a quick, hot kiss. That should do for now.

 “Is that a yes?” Derek smiles over his lips, his hand cupping the back of Stiles’ neck.

“Of course, what do you think? Now let’s deal with these – Scott, what did you call them?”

 “Evil fucks, Mister First Witch slash Second, sir,” Scott appears next to him with a wide maniac grin.

“Yeah. Time to chase these evil fucks out of our land, guys.”

The pack gives a hungry, bloodcurdling howl of appreciation. Stiles waves the barrier down, enjoying the smooth and obedient way magic flows through his channels, which is a new feeling. The witches are on their feet now, swaying from fatigue but ready to fight back. Anna is the only person still out of it on the ground, but neither group checks on her. Stares go flying back and forth, razor-sharp and promising all sorts of retaliation.

“Clever,” Dieter gives them a little nod – a big gesture coming from a guy like him. Then he actually chuckles. “You know, Alpha Hale, there are two things I respect in a person above all others: smarts and guts. That’s actually why I took Stiles in the first time I saw him, even though he was an inexperienced and mouthy mess of a witchling. Now I can see it runs in the family.”

“Drop the bullshit,” Derek growls, his canine teeth elongating mid-phrase. “You’ve brought a militarized witch unit on our territory, you have no right to be here, all of your claims are false and have no legal background. You have exactly one minute to leave our territory now – or face the consequences.”

“Cop mode on,” a small voice – probably Lydia’s – giggles somewhere behind Stiles, and he has to suppress a chortle.

Dieter shrugs, a small creepy smile plastered to those dry thin lips.

“Don’t worry, Alpha Hale, we respect the law.”

“Oh yeah?” Scott snorts. “Is this how you guys serve justice in Europe? Dudes, you _shot_ actual _bullets_ at a fucking coffee shop.”

“If you knew how much good your Second was bringing to our land, you’d fight dirty for him too, young man,” Dieter retorts, a trace of genuine bitterness in that tone. “But alas, we underestimated your Alpha. Now Stiles.”

He doesn’t want to make eye contact, but it feels like the last time he’ll ever get the chance to, and. . . Hell, Dieter was his mentor. And a friend.

“I hope you know how much your contribution meant to all of us. And if one day you could-”

“Clock’s ticking, shitheads,” Scott cuts him with a warning growl. “Tick fucking tock.”

“Yes,” Dieter sighs, sounding almost geriatric in that moment, and gives Stiles another look. “Well then. Best of luck, my friend.”

And with that, the witches are gone from their world forever.

 

 

Except not exactly. One week later, Miranda knocks on the door of his office.

“Boss, you left your phone on the counter, and it’s been ringing. Unknown number.”

Stiles shuts the door behind her, then checks to see if any of his wolves could be listening in. Miranda will be too busy flirting with Sean, and the others are way too far to hear anything. So he calls back.

“I’ve been waiting.”

“And I’ve been meaning to call, my friend.”

Something stirs inside Stiles’ chest upon hearing that voice – a mix of anger, sadness and maybe a little remorse.

“I didn’t get the chance to formally apologize for that ordeal. I hope your pack is all right.”

Stiles takes his time replying. The pack is fine, better than before actually. The stumps are all back to threads now, and the bond is so much stronger. His witch is learning to enjoy the feeling of constant emotional connection, and it’s a long process, but they’re coping.

“I know you meant well. You’re a witch – it’s in your blood to fight with all you’ve got. I mean, it was all pretty shitty what you did to me and my wolves, but I can sort of relate.”

Dieter chuckles at that.

“Oh you clever boy. We miss you around here lots, you know.”

“Yeah.”

Sometimes he misses being there too. Sure, there was a constant burden of guilt and remorse weighing him down almost every moment away from the pack, but he had learned to bury it deep, and above that was a peculiar feeling of camaraderie of mavericks, which was so very different from pack dynamics. He would lie if he said he didn’t enjoy that.

“Stiles, let’s get real for a minute here. You’ve got the smarts and the skill for the job, so does your Alpha, but you know how werewolves are. All about protecting their land. Your mindset is not as narrow as that, yours and Derek’s both.”

“It’s not just us two, you know,” Stiles scoffs, “my whole pack is actually kind of awesome.”

“I’m not debating that. Just think about it. And if you ever need help, I’m just a phone call away.”

Dieter was never a fan of flowery goodbyes, so when the phone goes dead, Stiles isn’t surprised. He sits back at his desk and stares at the computer screen for a long twenty minutes. The gears are turning inside his head.

 

 

“Hey, man,” Scott snakes his way in through a half-open door and into a small room where Stiles keeps coffee bags. “Hiding?”

Stiles stops rummaging through the bags to regard him with a sour look, “What, from Anna?”

Scott plops on one of the bags and gets comfy. All his movements are laid-back and lazy – the right combination for the kind of party they’re having over there, in the _Overdrive_ room, - but the thread connecting them tells Stiles there’s nothing laid-back about this visit. Nothing at all.

“She was actually looking for you. She wants to apologize, says Dieter lied to her and all that. She feels really bad, man.”

Stiles keeps his eyes firmly on the labels. Now where is this dark roast he ordered from Ethiopia not so long ago? He has promised his guests top-notch coffee, and by God he’ll deliver.

“Hey,” Scott says after a minute of silence. “So. . . I wanted to ask you something.”

 _I know_ , Stiles thinks. He’s been playing out this conversation in his head many times for the last couple of days.

“Shoot.”

Scott drops his shoulders, looking deflated and defeated.

“So Danny showed me your file. That was two weeks ago, when the whole witch mayhem was still going on.”

It wouldn’t be fair to keep hiding behind coffee labels anymore, and Stiles sits on a coffee bag opposite Scott. Poor guy, he really looks concerned.

“Okay. So?”

“So, like. . . Does Derek know you were married?”

Stiles nods.

“I told him everything. And he told me about Anna, but it’s not really what’s bothering you, is it?”

Scott sighs and leans against the wall. The room is pretty small, but the walls here are pretty thick – the wolves behind it are barely listening in on them. Besides, there’s music and voices and little Talia’s high-pitched laughter. The wolves are having fun.

“I guess not,” Scott says after a moment of thinking. “I’m actually a little freaked out by what was there about your job. I mean, magic force special ops unit sounds fancy as hell and all that, but, man. . . Is it true? Did you fight against the wolves?”

 Stiles has more than a dozen opening phrases prepared to ease Scott’s way into the confusing world of the European supernatural arena. It’s almost impossible to explain, you just need to live there for a year or more to only begin scraping the surface of the semantics behind words and actions. How is he supposed to explain all the intricacies and nuances to an outsider?

He decides not to.

“Scott, trust me when I say it’s a long conversation.”

“But did you kill any?”

“Only criminals.”

Scott studies him with a long, scrutinizing stare, but Stiles is done feeling ashamed for his past.

“Listen, Scott, I-”

“Are you going to go back to this line of work?” Scott suddenly blurts out, and there it is – the real purpose of this visit. Finally. “Stiles. Are you?!”

There is no point trying to wiggle his way out of this. Let Scott be the first Beta to know then.

“Derek and I are considering it.”

“What?” Scott springs to his feet.

“Sit back down, please, and keep your voice down. Don’t make me make you, because I’d really hate that.”

Scott is hot-headed, but he’s also a good soldier, and following orders is what he does best.

“So,” he crosses his arms as he does what he’s told, “tell me everything.”

Stiles shakes his head.

“Just the basics today, we’ll loop you guys in as soon as we figure out our next move. This is what I’m prepared to share now, don’t interrupt till I finish. One: I’ve researched it, and it turns out the supe world here doesn’t have an equivalent of the special ops I used to work for in Europe. This is pretty bad, and that is actually why packs are so reluctant to leave their territory even for a little while – there is no power protecting them if some rogue asshole decides that it’s their land now. And that’s just the werewolves, but you can imagine the scale of the problem considering how many supernatural creatures live in this country now. So far so good?”

“You mean like we don’t have supe FBI or something?” Scott frowns quizzically.

“Yes, sort of. Moving on. Two: I spoke to Derek about it, and he agreed that we must do something. Right now we’re meeting with all the neighboring packs, witch covens and other supe groups to figure out what we can do locally. It’s a long way to go, we need the help of supe lawyers and lawmakers, probably some international support as well. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but it’s happening. If you guys don’t want to get involved, that’s fine, but things are going to change around here, and we will be that change.”

Scott just stares at him without saying anything, but then Stiles remembers that Scott is a good soldier.

“You can ask your questions now.”

Scott nods.

“It sounds cool and all, but are you sure we need all this?”

“Well, if we had a, as you put it, supe FBI, Kate Argent wouldn’t have gotten away with what she did, the hunters would have behaved themselves and Derek and Laura wouldn’t have been left all alone after the fire.”

“Got it,” Scott gives him a firm nod, and Stiles can feel the cloud of doubt and fear around him slowly dissipating. “But the killings.”

“My team and I only killed dangerous criminal elements. And Scott, to be honest, how many supes have we murdered since we got sucked into this world?”

“But we had to,” Scott drops his gaze.

“Exactly. We were protecting our territory. Because no one else would.”

“Are you saying in Europe they got rid of inter-pack aggression?”

“Not completely, or else I’d have been out of work there. We supes are barbaric creatures, we like war. But at least you know you’ll get help if you’ve been wronged, you know?”

It’s very quiet for a long while. When Scott mulls over a concept that’s strange to him, he always has his signature expression on his face. Stiles watches him, thinking of all the times he’s seen the same face before: in Algebra class, after the first time he met Allison, when he found out he was a werewolf.

It’s a little scary how their friendship evolved over the years. Now they’re still close, but Stiles is Second, and a witch. And now a political activist? He doesn’t know if it’s the same friendship they used to have. Maybe this is how they were intended to end up from the start.

“But why was Dieter such a dick to you then if he stood for the same ideals you’re selling me now? Isn’t he supposed to be the good guy in this equation?”

 Stiles anticipated this question, and luckily, he’s thought of a decent answer.

“He’s actually not that bad. With a few screws loose, true, but he means well, and he was desperate to have me back. He really believed I belonged with them.”

“Where do you think you belong?” Scott asks suddenly, and that Stiles is not ready for.

The truth is, he belongs everywhere. The wolf part of him wants a nest, a home, a pack’s love and warmth, but the witch part wants freedom and power. The human wants change and a better life for everybody. So yeah, every path could give him satisfaction, but only all three can provide meaning.

When they return to the party, Scott helps Stiles carry the bag with the promised Ethiopian miracle coffee and Derek walks up to them.

“What did he ask?” he murmurs into Stiles’ temple as he places a careful kiss on it.

Stiles puts an arm around Derek’s waist and draws him closer, breathes in the familiar smell. He’s no real werewolf, but damn it, his Alpha smells good.

“He was freaked out a little. It’ll be okay though.”

“Should we be expecting more questions any time soon?”

Stiles shrugs and buries his nose in Derek’s neck.

“Couldn’t care less right now. Just hold me tight.”

Derek obliges. They’ve been excessively tactile, greedy even since the witch incident got resolved, and Stiles doesn’t want to change a thing about it. Well, maybe if the whole town dialed down the dirty jokes a little, that would be great, thank you.

Derek peppers the side of his face with lazy feather-light  kisses, moving in tune with an old blues song playing. Stiles relaxes into the sensation.

Home. He’s finally home.

“Hands above the waist, you two!” Dad’s voice cuts into the moment, effectively destroying it. “Swear to God, those kids! I don’t want a mental image of what you two were doing in Stiles’ room when he was sixteen.”

“Research, Dad, we were doing _research_!” Stiles yells back. “And I refuse to let go of Derek’s ass! This is officially my ass now! We’re werewolf-married!”

Roars of laughter follow, Miranda and Sean – the youngest of the pack – grow beetroot red and start urgently looking for a distraction, and Anna belatedly tries to cover her daughter’s ears. Stiles chuckles and kisses Derek – not to keep the show running but because right now, he just has to.

Because Derek’s warmth, and his dad’s harmless jabs, and the pack’s lewd comments are all sweet and precious fragments of Home. The home he has come back to deserve, and the home he is prepared to defend.

 

**Author's Note:**

> If you notice any typos, please let me know!


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